We took another step closer to the end of the Xbox 360 earlier this year, and you’d be forgiven for missing it. Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 store and marketplace would be closing its virtual doors for the last time, leaving its content inaccessible, and inadvertently giving us a glimpse of what a future of purely digital assets might look like.
This future looks bleak, with difficult, if not impossible, to preserve digital assets, leaving consumers with no legal method of acquiring a game they paid their hard-earned money for. We’ll take a look at what this bleak future might look like, and some attempts to save older games.
Download your content while you can
It won’t be available forever
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While it was widely publicized online that the Xbox Store and Marketplace would be shutting down, its inevitable that some people have missed it. Any purchased DLCs, Xbox Arcade games, and other content won’t be downloadable anymore, effectively killing the Xbox 360’s first-party online services. As Microsoft detailed in their announcement, and as mentioned in this great Reddit megathread on the shutdown, this effectively means that all content not stored on your hard drive when the store goes dark will no longer be (legally) accessible.
This marks a big first, as the Xbox 360 was one of the first consoles with a purely ‘download only’ selection of games, beating out the Playstation 3’s store by a few months. The platform was broadly considered a success, and as of 2016, there had been 719 Xbox Arcade titles released, ranging from the weird and wonderful to genuinely excellent smaller titles (and even PC classics like… CS:GO?). An online only digital store isn’t a first for gaming – the likes of Steam and Direct2Drive existed several years before the Xbox Arcade store (est. 2003 and 2004 respectively). Besides, it certainly wasn’t the first time games were available to download over the internet. But the increased difficulty in preserving console games, as well as the unavailability of physical alternative copies (back in 2004 most Steam Games were available as separate physical copies), makes this one of the first examples of a digital store where most of the content lacks a physical alternative.
the Xbox 360 was one of the first consoles with a purely ‘download only’ selection of games, beating out the Playstation 3’s store by a few months
This is important, as the rarity of physical copies of a game has in the past increased their value, previously making them more attractive to collectors, who in turn help preserve them. This dynamic is set to be lost for modern console games.
Is the Xbox Arcade a glimpse of the future – or the present?
You’ll own nothing and be happy about it
There’s been a gargantuan effort to preserve the contents of the Xbox Arcade store, but this does give us an unfortunate glimpse into what is to come for gaming. As physical copies of games become more and more scarce (whether they physically exist at all, or only in smaller and smaller numbers), accessing older games once servers and content stores have shut down will only get harder. The Xbox Arcade has fired the starting pistol in a battle for content preservation, without a clear end in sight. More and more effort will need to be put into backing up and preserving games that might otherwise be entirely lost or become unplayable without community support. As content stores eventually close, the problem is only amplified by the increasing move to ‘always-online’ licensing in video games, where the game won’t boot without a connection to a licensing server.
Most of these platforms providing digital downloads employ strict DRM support to make ripping their games for preservation difficult, and offer no guarantees on how long the platform will continue to be available. This is only exacerbated as modern consoles are increasingly moving away from physical media entirely (the recent announcement of the PS4 Pro called it
The Xbox Arcade gives us a glimpse into a world of dead software
