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

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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.

 

[Mewtwo_Rain]

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

"Ubisoft's anti-piracy scheme has many gamers fuming." Keep in mind it may have originated from that but it wasn't widely accepted as it became more and more accepted later on. That's due to something I'll bring up near the end: New kids being raised in that generation of consoles, normies invading the gaming sphere and more. Let alone shills pushing those optics encouraging it.

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

Well yeah, game journalist have always been shit. I mentioned that. I haven't read game reviews bar maybe EGM since PS1 days.

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.

We're talking about shooters within the post PS2/Xbox generation. Most of the games you are referencing are games from the start of gaming or N64 era. (IE: Doom is the grandfather of shooters) Shooters were
popular but as mentioned Halo was where it went mainstream into console gaming outside of N64 era where there was a drop off until Xbox "rejuvinated shooters" to a new level on consoles. Never forget before CoD took the crown it was Halo as the top dog of shooters on consoles.

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.

I don't disagree with this view on the issue, however, this is due to a few reasons: First: The new generation kids being raised on 360/PS3/wii generation were not taught any critical thinking on purchases, I still see it to this day where some new gamers refuse to buy anything but AAA games or series. This is also due to the normie sphere infiltrating said gaming sphere and not understand quality and quantity which for many years was known as "The COD effect." Where people would continue to buy CoD games even when the quality was sliding due to brand loyalty or being goy slop bottom feeders. It also is a issue caused by game consumers by ignoring quality for quantity and that is less to do with the corporations and generation of gaming and gamers themselves making stupid decisions in purchases. No one forced gamers at gun point to buy 1 million different series of Assassins Creed, they chose to do that themselves.

Edit: Easiest way I can compare it is to the movie industry, and movie critique scene, both sides have suffered due to the demographics invading both hobbies. why movies are shit now (not just due to politics pushing but lack of creativity and valuing sales over creativity.)

 

[Heed Not]

The fucking Xbox naming is so confusing.

Let's see if I have it right:

• Xbox
• Xbox 360
• Xbox One
• Xbox One S
• Xbox One X
• Xbox Series S
• Xbox Series X

and all the Ones are somehow related, and the "Series" are related, and fuck I'm confused again.

Honestly they could have fixed it and converged on 4 with resolution names.
Xbox
Xbox 720
Xbox 1080
Xbox 4(k) and 4 Mini
Xbox 5 and 5 Mini (you are here)

 

[JohnnyG]

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.

Lmao, so the criminals can't impersonate your l33t gamer tag. Giving InfoSec carte blanche to maximize security with no other constraints is like letting highway safety types set speed limits: 5mph everywhere and a crashed economy, but everyone safe!

I've seen 2FA on mandatory corporate HR training, which already requires you to enter your decrypt PIN to boot your laptop, login to Windows, and sign into corporate ethernet. Asking "who is possibly going to impersonate me to sit through the latest pronoun training?" fell on deaf ears...2FA is "best practice".

Honestly they could have fixed it and converged on 4 with resolution names.
Xbox
Xbox 720
Xbox 1080
Xbox 4(k) and 4 Mini
Xbox 5 and 5 Mini (you are here)

Takes me back to "they call it Xbox 360 cause it's so ugly, you'll spin 360 degrees and walk away" jokes. But yeah going from SD to HD to 4k, appending Slim/Mini, and even throwing a 60/120 at the end (if the leap to 8k is too far out but 60/120hz isn't) would make the hierarchy/sequence very clear.

The One X, One S, Series X, Series S is just a mess. Like with cars, you get to pick one "cool" letter to increment your standard model with (One X or One S, not both), and once you do that the next models need to be Xbox Two (and Two X or S).

 

[Mettaur]

Honestly they could have fixed it and converged on 4 with resolution names.
Xbox
Xbox 720
Xbox 1080
Xbox 4(k) and 4 Mini
Xbox 5 and 5 Mini (you are here)

The reason they didn't go with 720 is because the "360" designation wasn't arbitrary. It was referencing the front jewel on the console being a circle. Which lights up in a sequence the more players you have locally.

It wasn't like an Atari 2600 thing where they just picked a random number. I always knew 720 wasn't what they were going to go with for that reason.

The "Xbox One" thing was due to a trend at the time Microsoft was undergoing where they were naming things "One". Microsoft for example changed the name of their cloud file service "Skydrive" to "OneDrive" for example. They also briefly considered naming Windows 10 "Windows One" as a result but decided against it because there was an actual historical Windows 1.0. This was also back when Windows 10 was planned to be the "last version of Windows". The idea behind it at the time was they wanted to be the "One" solution you would need for any situation. This was dropped shortly after the Xbox One released.

The Series X|S thing was based on how they decided to ship two different consoles at two different power levels. And they decided to name the most powerful one the X because they wanted it to be more obvious.

 

[PassiveUnaggressive]

Xbox 360 E was the second slim model released in tandem with the Xbox One. I think it has fewer USB ports. I don't know why this one exists.

It exists to not be hackable. The Winchester CPUs in most of them can't be rgh'd, no fun allowed. If you are looking for a 360 for nostalgia reasons, I'd aim for whatever's cheap made 2008 and later that's not E (later 360 slim models will need a Corona postfix adapter iirc, but I think they're relatively cheap). I've only had hands-on experience with one Jasper and two Trinity, but it wasn't too hard to RGH, just needed patience. I messed up the Jasper when I applied too much pressure to the CPU die, though.... (I didn't have an x clamp tool. Get one.)

 

[Mettaur]

Xbox 360 E was the second slim model released in tandem with the Xbox One. I think it has fewer USB ports. I don't know why this one exists.

It exists to not be hackable.

This isn't exactly accurate. There's a video by MVG going over the history of the E Console

the tl;dr is that the at the time, the Xbox One was planned to be an always online device. Don Mattrick the head of Xbox at the time infamously said "If you don't like it we have another product which is 360". The idea was "We're moving to this digital only ecosystem, let's release another 360 model alongside the Xbox One to transition people to this new ecosystem". This obviously didn't happen as Microsoft would later backtrack on the always online aspect of the Xbox One. So the E console just became an unnecessary hardware revision that nobody really asked for. Another factor is the system's backwards compatibility wasn't a thing at launch, it didn't arrive until 2015. It was one of many bad decisions by Don Mattrick which was why he was fired from the company before the Xbox One actually released.

 

[Pissmaster]

This isn't exactly accurate. There's a video by MVG going over the history of the E Console
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wt8szKmKrRUthe tl;dr is that the at the time, the Xbox One was planned to be an always online device. Don Mattrick the head of Xbox at the time infamously said "If you don't like it we have another product which is 360". The idea was "We're moving to this digital only ecosystem, let's release another 360 model alongside the Xbox One to transition people to this new ecosystem". This obviously didn't happen as Microsoft would later backtrack on the always online aspect of the Xbox One. So the E console just became an unnecessary hardware revision that nobody really asked for. Another factor is the system's backwards compatibility wasn't a thing at launch, it didn't arrive until 2015. It was one of many bad decisions by Don Mattrick which was why he was fired from the company before the Xbox One actually released.

Interesting, but why was there a 4gb E model? If they're trying to transition people onto digital consoles, maybe, uh, don't release a model that's reliant on discs?

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Interesting, but why was there a 4gb E model? If they're trying to transition people onto digital consoles, maybe, uh, don't release a model that's reliant on discs?

Because fuck you. That's why.

 

[emergenigger]

I felt really old when I heard about this fuck

I've just mcfuckinghad it, it's ovee and those years aren't coming back, gut sinking feeling

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

my kiwibrother. shooters were a massive and massively popular genre long before Call of Duty and Halo

This nigga is spitting truth and fire. UT and Quake were massive on PC. Halo, a game designed for Apple, was purchased exclusively for Microsoft for their new console.

Memba "can it run crysis?" Pepperidge farm remembers.

 

[Mettaur]

Interesting, but why was there a 4gb E model? If they're trying to transition people onto digital consoles, maybe, uh, don't release a model that's reliant on discs?

I would assume because of streaming. Since another thing they pushed with the 360 somewhat early on was using Youtube/Netflix with it. But also they released a dashboard update letting you use portable HDDs for storage.

 

[Fluoxetine Man]

...??? 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.

Boy, you must be fun at parties!

 

[Barry Williams]

Well, I guess it finally did a 360 and walked away.

Before the store closed down I dipped into my most recent paycheck and bought a bunch of the XBLA games that were still available. I know a significant chunk of those games live on through other platforms or physical releases but a good number lived and ultimately died on the 360.

I will always remember and cherish how absolutely assmad people got when the spergs who did SmashMyXbox.com posted this video:

 

[Caligura]

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.

Train go boom.

 

[SuperShibuyaFighter]

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,

Gen 7 wasn't peak gaming imo but it was definitely peak online gaming.

Gen 4-6 were a lot more innovative and had better games overall but nothing can beat Gen 7's online experience. Before all the censorous crybullies, the greedy corporate business practices, and actual fun games.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

The 360 was a patently obvious attempt to not have “Xbox 2” go up against “PS3”.

Which they entirely shat away with the xbone.

 

[JohnnyG]

The Series X|S thing was based on how they decided to ship two different consoles at two different power levels. And they decided to name the most powerful one the X because they wanted it to be more obvious.

While the 360, One, etc. naming schemes may make sense individually, it still has no continuity and reeks of those new CEO/CTO transformation initiatives that are going to Change Everything until they're abandoned. How about a simple, cohesive strategy that people can follow from one gen to the next?

The X/S thing bugs me as a car guy, because it's not obvious which "go fast" letter is more premium, which is why you're supposed to pick one and stick with it. BMW 3 --> M3, Audi A4 --> S4. Or I guess double up if you want multiple tiers, like Audi RS. Something like Xbox --> Xbox S --> Xbox XS at least would've made it clear, but having S, X, and Series X is tarded.