Almost 5 years ago I bought a used Xbox 360 from a local game store. It was an original model, made in 2008, and was sold half jokingly with me reminded it could die on me at any moment. The console has not died on me, and indeed still works a treat. It’s been given a few upgrades in the form of a larger hard drive, a rare “Zero Hour” face plate, and an Xbox 360 HD-DVD player, and has been torn down, deep-cleaned, and put back together, but is otherwise still as it was when I got it. The console works fine but rarely is used much as it was 4 years ago.
I wrote about the purchase of the console, and my feelings on the Xbox 360 and it’s future in the article “How I learned to start loving the Xbox 360.” It was a piece telling the story of how I went from being a PlayStation fan to giving the Xbox brand a real try and deciding it was right for me.
In that article I wrote these lines;
The Xbox 360 still has at least another year and a half of life in it as a mainstream, supported system, and probably another 5+ years in the secondhand scene before it eventually becomes a relic in the same vein as the PS2, the Original Xbox, or the GameCube.
A friend of mine reminded me of this, and inquired how I felt now in late 2019. Recall the above article was written April 23rd of 2015 – 4 and a half years ago.
At the time, I genuinely expected Microsoft to cut the Xbox 360 off in much the same way as the Original Xbox console seemed to just be abandoned as soon as the Xbox 360 was launched in 2005.
Instead, by a very pleasant twist, Microsoft continued to put resources into the Xbox 360 for a bit longer, discontinuing production on the 360 console just as Backwards Compatibility for Xbox 360 games was gaining traction on the Xbox One. Of course the reason for discontinuation was out of real world necessity and scarcity of parts specific to the machine, but the thing to take away from it was that Microsoft wanted to make sure people could still enjoy Xbox 360 titles in one way or another with “new” hardware if they wanted to.
They didn’t really let the system die by abandonment.
Move ahead to today, in late 2019. Sure, the Xbox 360 doesn’t really have any new games coming out. Xbox Live service is still active on it, however, as it is for most all the games for the 360, and the library of games that are playable on the Xbox One through Backwards Compatibility has grown amazingly. Still, it’s no replacement for the real console.
That being said, while resources certainly have gone away from the Xbox 360 side of things, to be devoted to the Xbox One and the upcoming Xbox Scarlett, there’s still life in the Xbox 360 camp — the system got it’s first update in 2 years back in 2018, much to my surprise, so it isn’t abandoned by any means. A low priority, sure, but they still did something, somewhere, and that’s good.
On the software end, Games With Gold has provided players with a vast collection of Xbox 360 titles playable on the Xbox One, as well as on their 360 consoles. This means as far as “new” things to play that you didn’t previously have there’s a good chance, if you’ve collected the games over the past few years, that you have quite a few games you could fire up on that old 360 and enjoy just as much as you would on the Xbox One. Microsoft kept on giving us stuff to enjoy on the console, never taking anything away, and that’s in a sense the best part — the 360 has lived a stable, albeit laid back, life, alongside the Xbox One for the past 5 years. Quite impressive.
Still, it’s time to face reality — the console only has so much time left of being supported service wise. I originally figured back in 2015 it would be a couple of years before it began to be phased out, but that turned out to not be the case. That was shortly after the launch of the Xbox One, and now, with us coming up on the expected 2020 release of another generation of Xbox Console, it’s only a matter of time before it’s just seen as too old to be worth supporting, in one form or another.
The console is 14 years old now, well over the hill, and while there is no technical reason at this time that Microsoft needs to kill service for it (like there was when the Xbox Live service ended for the original Xbox in 2010) If Scarlett does similar to the Xbox 360 at a point in its life and introduces a major feature which cannot be implemented on the 360, then the safest option to help the Xbox Live service grow will be to end support on the 360.
That’s unlikely, however, since the Xbox Live service is much more mature at this stage, and Microsoft has already shown the ability to keep separate aspects of the service running at the same time – Avatars being different for the Xbox One and Xbox 360, as trivial as those are, show this something they can do.
Still, they can’t realistically support it forever, and once they decide it’s no longer cost effective to support Xbox 360 games online, they are likely to say “adios” to the service and the console for good. There’s no reason they have to, but it’s good business to eventually let something go, and trust me, it will eventually be shut down. It may be sooner, it may be later, but will it seriously make sense in 2025, 2030, or 2040 for Microsoft to still support the console? When is long enough enough? Who knows…
Until that time, though, a person with an Xbox 360 can still play most any game on it just the same way they have always been able to, and that’s just great.
Honestly, Microsoft has outdone themselves in supporting the console as well as the games for as long as they have, and I’m glad, however late it was, that I could join in to the experience. I said last time, and I’ll say it again — even when the system is long abandoned I’ll still enjoy firing it up from time to time to enjoy some great games as what they are — games, to be enjoyed.