Microsoft: Xbox 360 store closes
On Monday, Microsoft will close the Xbox 360 game console store, but owners of the newer consoles will still be able to buy 360 games.
The Xbox 360 digital store will be closed on Monday.
(Image: Lenscap Photography/Shutterstock.com)
It will soon no longer be possible to buy games digitally on the Xbox 360: Microsoft is closing the digital store of its games console on Monday. The company announced the move last August and most recently confirmed it in a blog entry from May - although an exact time is not known.
As soon as the Xbox 360 store closes, DLCs can no longer be purchased digitally. However, games that have already been purchased can still be re-downloaded. Users will also still be able to purchase and install titles on physical data carriers. Even multiplayer titles should still work as long as the publisher of these games supports the online servers. The cloud services for backing up game saves will also continue to operate.
Fans of the Xbox 360 generation can play many of their favorite games on the newer consoles from Microsoft anyway: The Xbox Series X/S is backwards compatible, meaning it works with most games that were originally launched for the Xbox 360. Microsoft provides a list of compatible games on a website.
19 years after release
The Xbox 360 was launched at the end of 2005, so it is now almost 19 years old. The fact that stores for outdated games consoles are shut down sooner or later is a well-known phenomenon in the industry. A study by the Video Game History Foundation shows that 87 percent of all video games released before 2010 can no longer be purchased on current platforms.
When Nintendo closed the digital stores for 3DS and Wii U, around 1,000 video games are said to have been lost, the Video Game History Foundation wrote last year. Due to the backwards compatibility of the Series X/S, the impact of the closed Xbox 360 store is likely to be less severe.
The store for the PS3, which was released in 2006, is still open. Sony has not yet announced a shutdown date.
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