Game Preservation Supporters Mourn the Closure of the Xbox 360 Marketplace

General news News Xbox Xbox News 07/31/2024

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After the Xbox 360 Marketplace closed its doors yesterday, you can no longer buy games online for the two-year-old Microsoft console.

It’s been almost 19 years since the Xbox 360 was released, so it’s essentially a retro console now. A few years later, the online game store came along, and that store ended yesterday. This means that you can no longer buy full games and DLC online for your X360, but you can access titles you’ve already purchased, and you can buy many backwards compatible games on the Xbox One and Xbox Series. Many other games are also available for PC.

The Video Game History Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on preserving games and their source material, commemorated the death of the Xbox 360 Marketplace on Twitter by making a cake. (And that’s the problem: if you can’t buy something LEGALLY, you’re left with the gray market, or even worse, piracy…)

The Midnight Society, which is working on a blockchain-based FPS (they recently got rid of Dr. Disrespect, a Twitch broadcaster), wrote that true digital game ownership could be the antidote. A peer-to-peer, user-to-user marketplace could replace the classic storefront platform, but that’s a prediction from them, not a fact, because RobotCache, for example, is one, and it’s a far cry from what Steam offers.

Today the Xbox 360 Marketplace shuts down for good, taking hundreds of games and DLC off the market, with no legal way to access them. We're working to fix copyright law for game preservation, but for now, we figured a cake wouldn't hurt. 🎂 pic.twitter.com/nxXIbJ8kkQ

— Video Game History Foundation (@GameHistoryOrg) July 29, 2024

The best solution is obviously CD Projekt’s solution, GOG. Sell your games DRM-free. They buy it, download it, put it on an external hard drive or SSD, and from then on they don’t even need the Internet (unless the game has features they want and need), so they can play it whenever they want. Of course, this is not a solution for the big publishers who push DRM (Denuvo, which many publishers NEVER REMOVE), or who try to do live service games, because they need servers and if they go down, it’s game over.

Thanks for everything though, X360…

Souce: PCGamer

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Angyal Anikó

Anikó, our news editor and communication manager, is more interested in the business side of the gaming industry. She worked at banks, and she has a vast knowledge of business life. Still, she likes puzzle and story-oriented games, like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, which is her favourite title. She also played The Sims 3, but after accidentally killing a whole sim family, swore not to play it again. (For our office address, email and phone number check out our IMPRESSUM)