I know what you did next summer: Microsoft to kill off Xbox 360 Store Microsoft revealed Thursday it will shutter its Xbox 360 Store next summer, nearly two decades after the console hit the market. That will leave the IT giant catering for its current-gen Xbox Series X and S consoles. Beginning July 29, 2024, Xbox 360 owners will no longer be able to purchase games, DLC, or other content, such …
I had a bit of a last minute purchase rush earlier this year when the Wii U eShop closed for new purchases. The one thing that is rather annoying is the inability to purchase DLC, so whilst you've already purchased the game, or subsequently obtained it on physical media you may be missing notable sections of content.
I'm pretty happy I obtained everything I reasonably wanted to, but it is a problem for anyone looking to collect in future years, piracy is the only option to obtain some DLC.
To be fair to Microsoft, backwards compatibility of 360 games on an XBox One is good enough that I've not bothered considering a 360 for the few games that need a real 360. The number of XBox Live only games appears to be even fewer, there's Bangai-O HD : Missile Fury which is a little too bullet hell for me, and Prince of Persia classic later reached other platforms. Will have to do a search to see if it's worth bothering buying a system prior to the shutdown.
> but it is a problem for anyone looking to collect in future years
Sadly, this has been an issue ever since "download only" games started to appear.
For the Xbox 360 in particular, they briefly dabbled with the indie scene via their "Xbox Live Indie Games" channel (XBLIG for short), which gave people free access to a devkit and then publish their creations via a "community curated" review process.
I don't know quite how many games came out via this process, but it was a good few thousand; I ran a review website for a while and reviewed around 1000 XBLIG games before drifting off to do other things.
And yeah: a lot of these were crap; amateur variations on breakout, blatant asset swaps of the examples provided in the dev kit, etc. But there were a few hundred which were genuinely good, only a fraction of which ended up being released on other platforms such as Steam.
And they've all been lost since XBLIG was shut down in 2017.
(Theoretically, I still have access to the demo versions of all the ones I reviewed, since Microsoft lets you redownload things. Guess I maybe need to fire up my antique X360 and spend some time downloading/copying the game files onto a USB stick...)
> "Sadly, this has been an issue ever since "download only" games started to appear."
Can I point you at a myriad of issues around software preservation, specifically citing in this instance the Nintendo Japan Famicom Satellaview missing content that surfaces every so often, or the N64 Disk Drive blue-disk content? Perhaps Sierra's missing source code for almost all its back catalogue and the stories about how and why would dispel?
It's not just a "download game" thing.
The XBox live arcade was annoying. Even code that *we* wrote is no longer runnable because the console needs to connect to their DRM / XBLA server before it executes.
I used to be quite active with Microsoft back then (my team won the UK finals for a fun little game development competition called the Imagine Cup (2009)). However I simply refused to port it to the XBLA until they removed that restriction. They never did with XBox 360, but they *did* with Windows 8/RT (when domain joined) and Windows 10.
Honestly life is too short for this kind of bullshit.
All of my backed up CD, DVD, Blu-ray and even VHS content is still functional.
I gave my cassettes away when I got my CD's (a mistake) , but my LP's still work just fine.
My Atari, Intellivision, Nintendo and C64 can still be plugged in and work with all of the (backed up in the case of the 64) games (though I should probably replace the caps soon)
I only had to purchase each these things once and can still use them at my leisure up to several decades later.
Over time clouds tend to drift over the horizon where you cannot see them anymore.
Exactly. I'm not a gamer but I have a PlayStation 2 that I got for €30 some years ago. Nice for messing around with on a rainy weekend. Games? Boot sales and the like, often around the €5 mark. Insert disc, and, well, that's it. No cloud, nothing to spend an eternity downloading, and no need to contact the mothership.
They are committed to the gameplay, just not committed to supporting an 18 year old system!
As much as I hate to say it, they don't need to keep the store open considering half their customers for the Xbox Series X might not have been alive when the Xbox 360 was released!
Imagine people complaining that Apple was planning to stop support the Iphone (the original) in two years time!! (they actually stopped supporting it 13 years ago)
People are a bunch of MS bashers and whiners here.
You can't buy online games or movies for a twenty year old console. Wow. Last time I looked it was really hard to go and buy brand new physical media for the 360 or PS2 as well.
If you're that worried, go and pick up a second hand disc for a couple of quid.
I'm all for bashing companies that get everyone on something then close it 2 years later, but fuck me, this is not one of them.
We are not bashing Microsoft for not supporting new downloads on an old console; we are bashing Microsoft for pushing downloads instead of physical discs for any console. A disc cannot be taken away at the whim of a greedy for-profit corporation. A disc cannot be taken away if the copyright owner gets in a dispute with another company. The article also states that non-game downloads will no longer be available, and conveniently enough, must be re-purchased for the newer console. That is what we are bashing all cloud downloads for, whether it is from Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.
"A disc cannot be taken away"
This.
As I said above, I can go buy (used) discs for my PS2. Clearly not the latest games, but everything that was released for it is around someplace in boxes and garages and bottoms of cupboards.
When it's "in the cloud", it always will depend upon the host existing and functioning. When the company behind it gives up (or goes bankrupt, bought out by a competitor, etc) then "pwooof!" all the cloudy goodness ceases and, well, that's the end of that.
"The article also states that non-game downloads will no longer be available, and conveniently enough, must be re-purchased for the newer console."
I wonder if that's a video codec issue? ie the new stuff is all, for example, X265, the XBox 360 doesn't support it, and the old stuff is X264, much bigger files, lots more bandwidth etc., and they'd have to transcode the source material to both formats to keep up with the 360 support.
Anyone know for sure? I'm just guessing, as I don't own any consoles and it seems odd that games are still there but not videos.
We keep the 360 alive in the sitting room for one (well, two) reasons - Rock Band Beatles and Rock Band 3. None of the instruments work on later Xboxen and only RB4 is on the compatibility list for the newer consoles. Beatles really is a beautiful game, crafted with a lot of care to the details. It will be a pity when our 360 finally bites it, though I admit we only dig the instruments out a couple of times a year now.
I honestly assumed they had closed the Xbox360 online services some time ago, so its good to see its still around for a while longer. But the 360 could always be used offline without any internet connection.
But I see the issue with the current gen and future gen consoles basically becoming bricks when their online services are shuttered, as they much more heavily rely on the servers to be able to operate.
And if they do remove the optical drives on the next gen of consoles then I feel sorry for those who live in rural areas where maybe ADSL speeds is the best they can get as its going to take over a day to download one 100GB game and that is assuming they don't use their internet connection for anything else while its downloading.
This reminds me that I need to find one of my 360s and play Sneak King before the console's capacitors and other electronics inevitably fail. It was a gag gift from my late friend, and it later became kind of a running joke how I never played it. Strangely enough, a game sold for a few dollars by an American fast food company as part of a limited-time promotion didn't make the cut for backwards compatibility on the One and Series consoles.
In and administrative PowerShell console,
Get-ProvisionedAppxPackage -Online | Where-Object { $_.PackageName -match "xbox" } | ForEach-Object { Remove-ProvisionedAppxPackage -Online -AllUsers -PackageName $_.PackageName }
Replace xbox with phone, removes all Xbox and Phone Link crap.
To actually answering your question - NO
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