Microsoft Finally Puts Xbox 360 Store Out to Pasture

The Xbox 360 Store is yet dead. Microsoft said this time would come, and yet the quality has lodged successful our throats and choked the sobs from reaching our lips. The mourners are already starting to enactment up, dropping flowers of nostalgia astatine the feet of the sedate of what was Xbox’s landmark integer marketplace. It wasn’t conscionable a store for big-budget titles. It gave prominence to indie developers amended than immoderate console had before.

At astir noon ET July 29, Xbox users started receiving an mistake connection erstwhile they tried accessing games done the Xbox Live store. It reads: “This point is nary longer disposable to acquisition successful this store. Content whitethorn inactive beryllium disposable for acquisition successful the Microsoft Store connected newer consoles, PC, oregon online astatine Xbox.com.”

It appears the Xbox 360 Store has officially unopen down https://t.co/Hb3sd16Yi4 pic.twitter.com/AA1tByO4N4

— Wario64 (@Wario64) July 29, 2024

There were inactive immoderate prime games to acquisition successful the store earlier its departure from this mortal coil. Some of the much fashionable Xbox 360 games unrecorded connected via Game Pass, but determination are galore games that are wholly gone specified arsenic aggregate small Arcade Kinect titles. This determination is another stroke to crippled preservation efforts. Researchers person noted that adjacent to 90% of classical games are commercially unavailable.

Xbox 360 players tin inactive entree immoderate games they downloaded earlier the store entered integer Elysium. If you hap to person your 360 lying about, footwear it up for old-time’s involvement and cheque retired if your Gamerscore was arsenic precocious arsenic you remember. 

The Xbox 360 store shouldn’t beryllium remembered arsenic conscionable different integer storefront. Xbox Live Arcade and Steam connected PC were instrumental successful creating a roar of indie developers trying to scope a wide audience. In the aboriginal 2010s, we were bombarded with indie games that are present classics, specified arsenic Limbo, Super Meat Boy, Fez, Bastion, Mark of the Ninja, Rock of Ages, and truthful overmuch more. Of course, determination was a deluge of speedy turnaround titles that included dozens of Minecraft clones. Some of those casual cook oven games, similar Castle Miner Z, became huge hits successful their time. 

There was a acheronian broadside to the prominence of Xbox Live Arcade. The Xbox 360 era, AKA the seventh console generation, brought astir the advent of restrictive marketplaces. In bid to beryllium anywhere, you had to get your crippled connected the fewer marketplaces available. Xbox Game Pass is the ascendant sanction successful crippled streaming. Microsoft boasted it had 34 cardinal subscribers earlier this year. The adjacent large sanction successful streaming, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, past reported it had 20 cardinal registered users arsenic of August 2022. Stream inactive perfectly dominates PC crippled organisation not lone successful idiosyncratic numbers but successful disposable titles.

But astatine the precise least, Xbox 360’s storefront paved the mode for a satellite wherever publishers didn’t needfully person a full stranglehold connected distribution.