On July 29, 2024, the Xbox 360 marketplace will be shut down forever.
Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, said in a recent interview that he would “love to find solutions” to preserve old games that may be lost because of this decision.
However, there are around 220 games that aren’t.
“That’s why we gave people with this decision a year,” Spencer told Eurogamer. “Let’s say ‘hey, if you want to go buy things in the 360 store, we’re going to give you a year headstart, and you can go get those things’. And just know that the list of the 220 games is something that we see, and we would love to find solutions for those games to continue to play.”
Video game preservation might sound easy — after all, it’s all digital, right? — but it’s much more challenging than that. First of all, you need to have a copy of the game in some form, usually physically, and even that is often difficult.
“For every Mario game that’s available, there’s hundreds of less popular games that are critically endangered,” said Kelsey Lewin, co-director of the Video Game History Foundation. This statement was made after a study provided numbers to emphasize the severe issues with video game preservation.
Then, you need to have the appropriate hardware to play it on. Emulators and backwards-compatible games might be crossing your mind right now, but they don’t necessarily offer the same experience as the original.
“How can we make sure [you can play the 220 games still]?” Spencer asked. “How many of those are on PC? That’s one thing, because it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be able to play it on the existing hardware that you bought 15 years ago, but preservation is front and centre when all these decisions are made.”
Even if you’re playing a backwards-compatible game (or one on an emulator that hasn’t made any changes to the game), you’re probably playing it on a new screen. Last year, the gaming community talked a lot about the fact that retro games do actually look worse now than they did when you were a kid, because the graphics were designed with an old screen in mind.
Spencer acknowledged this, saying: “I will say for us that preservation that’s linked to only one piece of hardware is a challenge. Because there can be hardware love as well — people who love and want this device to do this forever — but mechanical things will break over time.”
This isn’t just a topic for archivists and historians to care about, though. The implications of this affect modern gamers every day. More video games are skipping discs altogether, with Alan Wake 2 and Starfield being two notable recent examples. If you buy a copy in a store, the box will just contain a digital code to redeem. That means there’s no sharing the game with a friend, trading it in when you’re finished, or even playing the game again yourself if you lose access to the account.
It’s worth noting that this problem has been around for years if you’re a PC gamer. If you bought a game to play on a computer, it was almost certainly digital. The last PC games I remember owning physically were the old expansions to World of Warcraft, which took (what seemed like) forever to install across multiple discs. Everyone is just praying that their preferred gaming platform, like Steam or Epic Games, doesn’t flop.
Spencer didn’t comment on the move to digital games on consoles in this interview. He just explained that the decision was made so that they could focus on what players are largely interested in right now.
“The work on the 360 storefront was really just about the hardware and the lifespan of the hardware,” Spencer said. “We know how many people are playing 360 games on the 360. It’s a pretty small community. The community of buyers is very, very small. So as the back end — which is tied to that hardware, roughly — starts to kind of bring down just from a sustainability [point], and almost all the players have moved on, we’re like, ‘okay, we can focus our effort on where the players are and where they can buy’. So you can still go buy all the back compat games, all the multiplayer stuff all works. I think that’s pretty cool.”
Read the full interview with Eurogamer here.
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