Culture The Xbox 360 Store Shuts Down For Good Today - The marketplace was live for almost 19 years.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-xbox-360-store-shuts-down-for-good-today/1100-6525372/

https://archive.is/x2g1D

---

The final countdown has begun for the Xbox 360 store, which officially shutters today after opening shop almost 19 years ago. That means you won't be able to buy Xbox 360 games or DLC on the marketplace in a matter of hours. However, they will still be available to play and redownload for people who already purchased that content.

Larry Hryb, also known as Major Nelson, marked the occasion on X, saying it was his "pleasure sharing all the thousands of marketplace sales and updates I've given over the years." Just over a year ago, Hryb left Xbox after spending 22 years with Microsoft, with his last position being senior director of corporate communications.

Almost 19 years on, all good things must come to an end. We are in the final 24 hours (or so) of the Xbox 360 Marketplace.

It was my pleasure sharing all the thousands of marketplace sales and updates I’ve given over the years.

Thank for having fun, playing fair and filing…
— Larry Hryb, Gamer Emeritus (@majornelson) July 28, 2024​

In August 2023, Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 store would be closing today, July 29--giving people almost a year heads-up. Additionally, the Microsoft Movies and TV app will no longer function on Xbox 360 systems, meaning you can't view your content on those consoles.

However, Microsoft does say that any backward-compatible Xbox 360 (and original Xbox) games will still be available for purchase on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox.com. Online multiplayer support, meanwhile, depends on publishers and developers for Xbox 360 games and won't be affected by the store's shuttering.

As for Xbox, the latest big update for consoles and cloud arrived last month, bringing new background customization, subscription management on consoles, and mouse-and-keyboard functionality for cloud gaming.

 

[Margo Martindale]

Chris Chan celebrating the downfall of the hexbox store right now

 

[Random Internet Person]

7th Generation Xbox live Call of Duty was gaming at it's peak. It was when online gaming was becoming widespread and easy but before the fun police started to put up all those censorious rules. The Wii and PS3 was cool too,

Xbox fell off hard in the years since. Nintendo and Sony…Switch is kicking the PS5’s ass last I heard.

Most Call of Duty games post-Black Ops 2 have become mindless microtransaction day-one DLC ridden slop. None of the campaigns have ever hit as hard as it did in like BO2 and COD4, and the multiplayer is a joke. Instead of grinding your ass off to unlock everything including the best looking camouflages, you have to use lootboxes. How the mighty have fallen.

Still got my physical copy of World at War. Took me about 13 hours to beat it on Regular.

 

[Quintex96]

Still got my physical copy of World at War. Took me about 13 hours to beat it on Regular.

Were you born without hands or something?

 

[Random Internet Person]

Were you born without hands or something?

I don’t speed run, that’s for sure.

 

[ZazietheBeast]

360 had easily some of the best games. I remember buying it just to play Bioshock and Gears. It also helps that the console can also play DVDs.

 

[Osama Bin Laden]

...??? the generation where everything became oversimplified console slop

i love how anime and soyjak pfps consistently have the worst takes imaginable on literally anything

 

[2ndBest]

"Who can say where the road goes..."

 

[Michael Wade]

Ps3 is still up for now but they'll shitcan it as soon as they figure out backwards compatibility.

 

[Rekeita's Kidneys]

Perhaps it is now time to RGH my consoles

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.

 

[Looney Troons]

Has anything changed for the better since the original MW2?

No.

I would also say gaming, at least AAA releases, began to decline shortly after its release. Even though 2010 was a year of kino gaming, companies started to aggressively test the waters with DLC, live services, “HD remasters”, and gay early access titles. Shit has only become more predatory and the quality of games released has severely dropped.

MW2 is where my gaming plateau began to take a sharp nosedive. I wouldn’t agree that the late
2000s were the best era for gaming as I was around to experience the magic of all of the sweet technological advancements from the late 90s and early 2000s. Imagine going from playing Duke Nukem 3D to something like Half-Life or Tribes. Imagine playing Final Fantasy VII and then connecting to the Internet to play EverQuest.

Even though I will rank the original MW2 and Uncharted 2 up there in some of my most cherished gaming memories, I don’t think we will ever experience the same levels of technological leaps as we did back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Had high hopes for VR but it’s been almost ten years in the mainstream and all we’ve got are rhythm games and rail shooters.

 

[Pissmaster]

Xbox fell off hard in the years since.

The Xbox brand fell off for a number of reasons, but if there were one tidy little video that perfectly demonstrated the wanton disrespect of everyone interested in the brand, from which it never recovered, it was this one.

The best part about that video? They nuked the always-online requirement with a day one patch due to its severe unpopularity. The cat was already out of the bag, though, and the brand is still suffering to this day.

 

[FieldPiece]

Are the Dishwasher games available anywhere else? Those were really fun if broken games and the guy who made them ended up making Salt & Sacrifice and Salt & Sanctuary. Also probably the only way to get Super Meat Boy with the original soundtrack. The Indie Arcade market was full of slop but it was fun slop, kinda like the old days of the VHS boom. A favorite by the guy who made Dishwasher and the Salt games.

Lots of great memories. I remember that first summer of arcade with legit amazing games like Super Meat Boy and Splosion Man.

 

[Pissmaster]

The Indie Arcade market was full of slop but it was fun slop, kinda like the old days of the VHS boom. A favorite by the guy who made Dishwasher and the Salt games.

I Maed a Gam3 w1th Z0mb1es 1n it!!!1 is free on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1800730/I_MAED_A_GAM3_W1TH_Z0MB1ES_1N_IT1/

Also probably the only way to get Super Meat Boy with the original soundtrack.

I think the Steam version still has that, too.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

360 had easily some of the best games. I remember buying it just to play Bioshock and Gears. It also helps that the console can also play DVDs.

Ahahaha I remember when HD-DVD finally ate shit so we grabbed the HD-DVD addon for the 360 and a fuckton of movies for like $50.

 

[Burning Bridge]

...??? the generation where everything became oversimplified console slop? the era of the QTE-heavy action-adventure? the era of the brown cover shooter? the era where the entire first-person shooter genre was thrown in the garbage in favor of churning out endless COD4 clones and military propaganda? the era where Spec Ops: The Line was considered the peak of Games As Art? the era where Activision, EA, and Ubisoft came to dominate gaming culture with shallow, annualized franchises? where publishers deliberately tried to eliminate the PC as a viable platform to cut development costs while shifting the blame to consumers by using piracy as a red herring? the era where always-online DRM became the norm, and gamers were scolded for being uncomfortable with it? the era where every game review outlet was quietly bought out by media conglomerates and converted into glorified advertising platforms whose staff are paid to print 10/10 reviews for every new high-budget turd squeezed out by the top publishers, chasing out all the old hobbyists and replacing them with the type of soulless soy grifter that led to gamergate? the era where there was a "debate" over whether 1080p/60 FPS was necessary for gaming, all because Microsoft's shitbox was designed to run at 720/30? the 7th generation was a brutally cursed era that degenerated the entire industry and artform, and gaming culture is still struggling to recover from it, because of all the kids that grew up during this era that are conditioned to think it was Good, Actually. rip bozo.

You forgot to mention the complete assassination of the RTS genre by ASSFAGGOTS.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

i love how anime and soyjak pfps consistently have the worst takes imaginable on literally anything

insane that adults today really have this viewpoint. guys, remember when gaming was dragged screaming into the hyper-corporate hellscape it is today? man, those were some good times. every criticism most of you fags have about modern gaming, like how everything is woke now, and how AAA games keep raising prices and lowering quality, microtransactions being substituted for gameplay, the mainstream being taken over by soulless made-by-focus-group hog slop, lazy PC ports with terrible technical issues, draconian DRM that treats the consumer like the enemy, it all got its start here. for sure, many of these things existed in the industry before, but largely in isolation; the terrible shape of the modern industry began to coalesce in these days, and many years passed before the indie and AA scenes got big enough to fill the void left by the major companies' constant sacrificing to the altar of profit.

 

[Osama Bin Laden]

insane that adults today really have this viewpoint. guys, remember when gaming was dragged screaming into the hyper-corporate hellscape it is today? man, those were some good times. every criticism most of you fags have about modern gaming, like how everything is woke now, and how AAA games keep raising prices and lowering quality, microtransactions being substituted for gameplay, the mainstream being taken over by soulless made-by-focus-group hog slop, lazy PC ports with terrible technical issues, draconian DRM that treats the consumer like the enemy, it all got its start here. for sure, many of these things existed in the industry before, but largely in isolation; the terrible shape of the modern industry began to coalesce in these days, and many years passed before the indie and AA scenes got big enough to fill the void left by the major companies' constant sacrificing to the altar of profit.

very cool, i’m not reading all that

 

[Starved Artist]

Ps3 is still up for now but they'll shitcan it as soon as they figure out backwards compatibility.

Sony has been making the PS3 worse with every update since 2014. We've reached the point where you need to enable 2FA, just to log in on a PS3 and connect online.

 

[Mewtwo_Rain]

The best part about that video? They nuked the always-online requirement with a day one patch due to its severe unpopularity. The cat was already out of the bag, though, and the brand is still suffering to this day.

I remember fighting that online back in the day, that's around the time Microsoft was definitely hiring shills to push always online everywhere as if it was a good thing. The consumers weren't stupid enough to fall for it at that point yet.

very criticism most of you fags have about modern gaming, like how everything is woke now, and how AAA games keep raising prices and lowering quality, microtransactions being substituted for gameplay, the mainstream being taken over by soulless made-by-focus-group hog slop, lazy PC ports with terrible technical issues, draconian DRM that treats the consumer like the enemy, it all got its start here.

No. That came with XBO/XBX and PS4/PS5 era sadly. Sony for instance pushed a "time bomb" of sorts in the PS4 system, and XBO began pushing the "we're fighting pirates make sure your game requires downloading gigs worth of content on your small HD/SD lol" The start of the PS4/XB1 era wasn't entirely shit but it went downhill fast even with some winnings games here and there.



In regards to your comments on Spec Ops the line, and how games were all conformed to shooters. 50/50. I've never heard most people talking about SOtL as being the master of art sure maybe a lot of normies, but in general no. In regards to shooters becoming so prevalent that's due to the likes of Borderlands/CoD/Hao trifecta. Trends often follow in the wake of a new popular outcome. RPGs have had the same issue prior to that generation and I miss RPGs being on top.

In regards to cutting PC: PC wasn't popular initially that's the real reason, as games got put on PC more and more it became more popular, it was about standard greed but that came after.

The soulless grifters came from gaming hitting the mainstream at that time. Technically due to PS2/XBox and GCN which led to normies jumping aboard and never touching actual good games, then again, most normies never actually touched most games if you look at achievement %. Most stage 1 games have less than 40% of purchasers completed said stage. Normies bought consoles for decoration to look cool not that big of a surprise even if it hurt gaming industry and in regards to game reviews: They were always scum. Very few like EGM were pretty solid most were like "DQVII (PS1) has too much text, wah."

In regards to EA/Ubisoft/Activision taking over, again due to normies making gaming mainstream shallow games won the era over and over again. It's only now many people are starting to notice some of the more major series that were ignored or not noticed since Ps2 or earlier era. (DQ/DMC/DR/etc.) Most of the main series during PS3/360 era were at their strongest, such as GOW which wasn't wokified until PS4 and on era and many games from PS3/360 went also unnoticed until XBO/PS4 era, such as MGR.


You're placing blame on that generation, it's the generation ahead that embodies everything wrong with modern gaming, and that's because of who or what demographics were encouraged to get into it at that point.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

No. That came with XBO/XBX and PS4/PS5 era sadly. Sony for instance pushed a "time bomb" of sorts in the PS4 system, and XBO began pushing the "we're fighting pirates make sure your game requires downloading gigs worth of content on your small HD/SD lol" The start of the PS4/XB1 era wasn't entirely shit but it went downhill fast even with some winnings games here and there.

https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2010/0219/Why-Ubisoft-DRM-for-Assassin-s-Creed-2-has-outraged-gamers

In regards to your comments on Spec Ops the line, and how games were all conformed to shooters. 50/50. I've never heard most people talking about SOtL as being the master of art sure maybe a lot of normies, but in general no.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/26/spec-ops-the-line-review

https://www.eurogamer.net/spec-ops-the-line-review

https://worthplaying.com/article/2012/7/10/reviews/86568-xbox-360-review-spec-ops-the-line/

https://www.destructoid.com/reviews/review-spec-ops-the-line/

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/spec-ops-review-pc

In regards to shooters becoming so prevalent that's due to the likes of Borderlands/CoD/Hao trifecta. Trends often follow in the wake of a new popular outcome. RPGs have had the same issue prior to that generation and I miss RPGs being on top.

In regards to cutting PC: PC wasn't popular initially that's the real reason, as games got put on PC more and more it became more popular, it was about standard greed but that came after.

my kiwibrother. shooters were a massive and massively popular genre long before Call of Duty and Halo. the PC existed as a distinctive and important platform that had the exclusive domain of a few very specific and very popular genres, foremost among which was the shooter. games like Doom, Duke 3D, Quake, Unreal, and so on had cemented the genre's popularity and console publishers coveted it immensely. for a long time, shooters were considered too fast and graphically intensive for consoles, but repeated attempts were made to square the circle, which is why games like Turok, Goldeneye, and Perfect Dark were quite celebrated despite being pretty clunky and ugly in retrospect.

Halo was the game that broke the dam by achieving mass popularity with the new generation of console gamers emerging in the early 2000s when gaming was just starting to become massively more mainstream. after that, shooters slowly died out on the PC - because these new gamers largely opted for the much cheaper and less technical option of buying a console rather than tooling around with PC gaming - with Call of Duty 4, an all-platform release that caught on much harder with the younger console audience, serving as the coup de grace. once the PC shooter market lost its gas, nobody cared about us oldfags; according to the industry spokespeople, PC gamers were mostly ungrateful thieves who cost developers and publishers more money through piracy than they returned through legal purchases.

but as the profitability of the genre expanded, and the genre space became increasingly occupied by massive publishers like Microsoft and Activision, creativity was rapidly strangled out of the process in favor of cynical, profit-driven design. in Activision's case, they literally chased the heads of Infinity Ward out of the company to avoid paying them residuals for Modern Warfare 2, and to get another developer in (Treyarch) that they had a tighter legal grip on. and many other companies took Activision's aggressive profit hounding as inspiration, such as Ubisoft, which notoriously turned as many as their popular franchises as they could - namely Assassin's Creed and FarCry - into annualized money farms.

it became an industry-wide problem. and that's why a game like Spec Ops - a totally unremarkable cover shooter whose only distinguishing feature is daring to have an "are we the baddies" type story in the Call of Duty genre space - turned so many heads at the time. this is the legacy of the 2005-2013 era, the generation during which the XBOX 360 was the dominant platform.