Culture
Games
Microsoft
Xbox
Xbox One
In this week’s newsletter: We’ve become so used to digitally downloading games
now that it’s easy to forget how novel it once was, thanks to places like Xbox
360’s Marketplace
• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here
The Xbox 360 digital store is the latest to go offline, following the Wii U and
3DS store shutdown in March. It shut down on Monday, taking about 220 games with
it, according to analysis by Video Games Chronicle. Preservation activists at
the Video Game History Foundation even made a funeral cake.
Microsoft is definitely the best of the major companies when it comes to
backwards compatibility and game preservation – despite those 220 lost games, a
huge percentage of the Xbox 360’s back catalogue can still legally be played on
later consoles. And it is remarkable that the Xbox 360 Marketplace lasted almost
20 years (the console was released in late 2005). It wasn’t the first digital
store on a console, but it was the first one I ever used, and I assume the same
was true for a lot of British players – the Xbox 360 was the most popular
console of its generation in this country. In retrospect, the Marketplace was
astonishingly ahead of its time.
Continue reading...