After 18 years of support, one of the Golden Age consoles is finally losing a long-fought battle with it drawing its final breaths. While the Xbox 360 was home to some of the best exclusives of a forgone era, the ability to purchase these titles through the Xbox Store has been one of the biggest reasons to buy a newer console, but it seems that all good things must come to an end at some point or another.
The news was broken by Twitter (recently rebranded as X) user @Wario64, stating that the Xbox 360 Store is shutting down in July 2024. While you can continue to download and play games that you have purchased before this time, you will no longer be able to purchase games or DLC digitally for this console after the shutdown has commenced.
This may come as a shock, especially since Activision was recently in the news for bringing classic Call of Duty games back to life on the platform, but we really can’t be too surprised. Nintendo shuttered support for the 3DS and Wii U in about half the time, so we can only start building up a list of games we need to purchase before the unfortunate closure.
According to the Xbox Support Page regarding this closure, fans that are hoping to jump on for some multiplayer thrills won’t need to worry, as stated in the following:
- Yes. When signed in, games on disc and downloaded games will launch and play as expected. When offline, disc games will continue to work as expected, but some downloaded titles may show as ”Trials” if the license for that game is tied to another Xbox 360 console. To make sure you have the licenses for your content set to the proper console, refer to the guide below explaining how to transfer your Xbox 360 licenses: Redownload purchased content to a new or refurbished Xbox 360 console
So, those that may have busted out their old console after years of being in storage are still in luck. If you have Physical discs or Digital downloads, you will still be able to redownload those and continue playing them, since Backwards Compatibility is not going anywhere at this point.
While it’s a shame to see the loss of all these digital items, it’s great to see that Microsoft had continued supporting this long-extinct console for all these years. It’s time to pour one out for one of the greatest consoles of all time, and hope that we can get our hands on all of our favorite games before the resellers do.
