Xbox 360 Digital Marketplace, R.I.P.

[Metalhead]

I bought a bunch of games on that marketplace right before it got taken offline for eternity a little over 50 hours ago. Now I am going to play through everything I bought. I am prioritizing the 360 and the PS3 backlogs for the time being.

I remember many great Xbox Live Arcade purchases back in the day.

At least the PS3 store is still alive, but who knows for how much longer?

 

[Misery]

Honestly I'm kinda confused on that whole thing. Why not just take those things and add them to the current store for the current consoles?

Heck, I had a 360 way back when (it's long since dead) and my digital Live Arcade purchases from then all reappeared when I got the Series X, since I'm still using the same account from back then. They are still there, and they do run on the thing (what DOESNT run is most disc-based games). It seems like it should have been trivial to just put the games onto the current store, for preservation and whatnot, as they clearly work properly.

This is all the more reason as to why I'm such a fan of emulation and whatnot. Anything that can preserve older titles that the big stupid companies dont care about. Though 360 emulation is a lot more annoying than NES or SNES emulation. Certainly not impossible, just... annoying.

I will say though, a lot of memories of that old gizmo. I actually had an imported unit, from Japan, because region locks are made of stupid and for some baffling reason all the shmups went onto that thing instead of the Playstation consoles. Extremely expensive, all of it. Wasnt uncommon to have to pay like $120 for a single game. Which is one of the reasons why I'm not particularly sad to see physical media go away.

 

[Princess Viola]

Honestly I'm kinda confused on that whole thing. Why not just take those things and add them to the current store for the current consoles?

Heck, I had a 360 way back when (it's long since dead) and my digital Live Arcade purchases from then all reappeared when I got the Series X, since I'm still using the same account from back then. They are still there, and they do run on the thing (what DOESNT run is most disc-based games). It seems like it should have been trivial to just put the games onto the current store, for preservation and whatnot, as they clearly work properly.

It's really not that simple.

Xbox 360 backwards compatibility on the Series X is emulation-based and not hardware based and 360 games had to be specifically patched and updated to run on the internal Xbox 360 emulator Microsoft uses for backwards compatibility. (Remember - these games are actually enhanced when running on the Series X, they being ran at higher resolutions, more stable framrates, etc. compared to how they ran on the 360 hardware)

But Microsoft can't force or mandate that developers updated their games to make them backwards compatible, to say nothing of licensing or technical constraints that would prevent a game from being patched as well.

That's actually why they stopped adding both Xbox 360 and Xbox games to their backwards compatibility catalog in 2021 because they hit the limit in terms of what they could add.

So Microsoft can't just go and move all of the games from the 360 store to the store on their current consoles because they legally cannot do that and what games have already been made backwards compatible are already available on the store (well unfortunately there are some backwards compatible titles have been taken down from sale because of expired licenses but that has nothing to do with backwards compatibility, that affects any video games with licensed aspects)

 

[damoisellepeachy]

I haven’t played Xbox but I often get sad when digital game console stores get taken off service. Also lucky that you brought the games you got before it got shut down

 

[Joshua the Writer]

It's really not that simple.

Xbox 360 backwards compatibility on the Series X is emulation-based and not hardware based and 360 games had to be specifically patched and updated to run on the internal Xbox 360 emulator Microsoft uses for backwards compatibility. (Remember - these games are actually enhanced when running on the Series X, they being ran at higher resolutions, more stable framrates, etc. compared to how they ran on the 360 hardware)

But Microsoft can't force or mandate that developers updated their games to make them backwards compatible, to say nothing of licensing or technical constraints that would prevent a game from being patched as well.

That's actually why they stopped adding both Xbox 360 and Xbox games to their backwards compatibility catalog in 2021 because they hit the limit in terms of what they could add.

So Microsoft can't just go and move all of the games from the 360 store to the store on their current consoles because they legally cannot do that and what games have already been made backwards compatible are already available on the store (well unfortunately there are some backwards compatible titles have been taken down from sale because of expired licenses but that has nothing to do with backwards compatibility, that affects any video games with licensed aspects)

I bought a used copy of Diablo 3 and was surprised that it wasn't backwards compatible with Xbox One. You'd think with how big the Diablo series is, it would certainly be updated. You can still buy the 360 version on the Xbox One store, though. I guess I have to sell this physical copy so I can find a cd key for a good price for either the pc or Xbox version.

Since the Xbox OS is built off of Windows, so I have no clue why the backwards compatibility is emulation based.

 

[Misery]

It's really not that simple.

Xbox 360 backwards compatibility on the Series X is emulation-based and not hardware based and 360 games had to be specifically patched and updated to run on the internal Xbox 360 emulator Microsoft uses for backwards compatibility. (Remember - these games are actually enhanced when running on the Series X, they being ran at higher resolutions, more stable framrates, etc. compared to how they ran on the 360 hardware)

But Microsoft can't force or mandate that developers updated their games to make them backwards compatible, to say nothing of licensing or technical constraints that would prevent a game from being patched as well.

That's actually why they stopped adding both Xbox 360 and Xbox games to their backwards compatibility catalog in 2021 because they hit the limit in terms of what they could add.

So Microsoft can't just go and move all of the games from the 360 store to the store on their current consoles because they legally cannot do that and what games have already been made backwards compatible are already available on the store (well unfortunately there are some backwards compatible titles have been taken down from sale because of expired licenses but that has nothing to do with backwards compatibility, that affects any video games with licensed aspects)

Well that's all annoying. Not exactly surprising, but still, annoying.

All the more reason really as to why I just dont do the consoles very much. I never find myself worrying about this kind of thing at all with PC games; if it was released at some point and is not an MMO or other type of game that requires a constant server, chances are, I can find it, and then get it running, probably without much trouble. Heck, I've got an archive of stuff like that... even ancient DOS games from the CGA era are easily run. Even if a particular game did take some trouble to get going, at least it CAN be done.

But consoles? No, even if you still own those actual physical discs, that new gizmo just plain aint gonna run the previous version's games because... consoles.

Just... ugh. I'm glad the emulation scene exists. My 360 is long dead, but the game discs are all still usable on this PC here.

 

[Princess Viola]

I bought a used copy of Diablo 3 and was surprised that it wasn't backwards compatible with Xbox One. You'd think with how big the Diablo series is, it would certainly be updated. You can still buy the 360 version on the Xbox One store, though. I guess I have to sell this physical copy so I can find a cd key for a good price for either the pc or Xbox version.

Since the Xbox OS is built off of Windows, so I have no clue why the backwards compatibility is emulation based.

There is actually a very simple reason why Diablo 3 wasn't made backwards compatible for the Xbox One: the Xbox One has a native version of the game. Came out in August 2014 and the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility on the Xbox One wasn't a thing until June 2015 for eligible Xbox Preview program users and November 2015 for every Xbox One.

And as for why the backwards compatibility is emulation based, it's because the Xbox 360 and Xbox consoles starting with the Xbox One use completely different hardware architecture. The Xbox 360 uses PowerPC-based architecture and the Xbox One onward is x86-64, 360 games are not designed to run on the architecture of the Xbox One and later Xbox consoles.

It's the same reason why if you were to, for some godforsaken reason, buy an ARM-based Windows laptop and want to run some programs that were designed for x86 architecture, they have to run through an emulation-based compatibility layer even though both an ARM-based Windows laptop and one using x86 architecture (Intel or AMD) are both running Windows because they weren't programmed to run on ARM architecture. If you were to somehow try to run it without the compatibility layer...it wouldn't work.

 

[FilterFreq]

I had a 360 for about 5 minutes in recent years. Weirdly I don't remember what I even played on it... probably just a whole bunch of Skate 3 until I decided hooking up systems was annoying.

It's interesting, because my Steam library seems to age like fine wine. Everything plays better with modern hardware, bugs get squashed all the time (save for those few instances where games get neglected), and I'm never forced into upgrading just to play newer games. Oh yeah, and my indie taste keeps everything cheaper.

I'm going to have to say PC is the way to go, at least for now. If anything happens to Steam, I will have no faith left

 

[Raggamuffin]

I played Skate 3 a lot on the 360. In fact I bought a 360, an Xbox one, and Xbox Series X to replay Skate 3. The newer consoles still had significant framerate issues playing Skate 3.

I also tried No Man's Sky on the Series X, thinking maybe it'd be smoother than my bottlenecked PC. Whilst it has a 3070 TI - it has a 6 series i7 quad core. Anyway, turns out the Series X framerate on most planets was unplayable. I'm not sure how or why they'd allow such terrible stutter and framerates down into the single figures many a time. It reminded me of Goldeneye on N64 where you threw a bunch of remote explosives - detonated it, and the whole game went in slow motion as it tried to render multiple explosions.

I also tried Fallout 4 - again thinking maybe it'd be playable on the Series X. I was wrong. It was like it was running in slow motion, straight from the beginning. Whether I tried lower resolutions, higher refresh rates etc. - nothing worked. It was like it was running in treacle. Constant slow motion the whole time. Unplayable. Truth be told it plays well on my PC even with the high resolution texture pack released by Bethesda. Some slow down in downtown Boston - but I've used a bunch of mods and .ini tweaks to get it running well. I genuinely thought the Series X would be a plug and play Fallout experience. And I turned it off within 2 minutes from the character creation screen.

After a few months I gave up and sold the Series X and stuck with my PC. Truth be told, since the 360 generation of consoles I've spent 99% of my time on my PC.

Ed

 

[Misery]

Truth be told, since the 360 generation of consoles I've spent 99% of my time on my PC.

Yeah, this is how it's been for me.

The 360, I used a lot, but it was almost entirely just imported shmups; there was literally no other way to play any of them.

I had a PS2, and that did get used a ton, and I had a lot of games for it, but holy pudding pops I freaking HATED that thing. What a piece of junk. I went through ten of them. TEN OF THEM. But again, the only way to play some things, and some of the games on that stupid gizmo were important to me. But after the last one broke (because of course it did), I'd had enough and sold everything off.

I had a PS3, that was just the LittleBigPlanet machine. Did it do other things? I genuinely dont even remember.

I have a PS4, but it's basically a paperweight. I have absolutely no idea why I even bought that. There's nothing to do on it. I dont even know where it is, last time I saw it was a few years ago, and I cant be bothered to look for it.

Hated the Wii. Hated it.

Almost forgot the Wii U even existed, I did have one though.

I have a Switch, that's useless too. Mostly just plays Mario Maker, but I really dont like the thing. And it's been used in handheld mode MAYBE 3 times, and for only like 10 minutes each time... horribly uncomfortable device. It seems like most people get one for Zelda, but honestly the last Zelda game I actually liked was Link to the Past. And Metroid is... it sure exists, yep. It's definitely a game. Probably, I dont know. So that thing isnt very useful.

I had figured at this point that the Switch and PS4 would be my final consoles... I'm genuinely much more interested in playing the old Atari 2600 than I am those things... but the Series X was just outright given to my by a friend of mine, that came out of nowhere. Honestly? It's decent. I wouldnt have bought one myself, but still, I do use it somewhat.

I will say, that thing does have a particular use: any "big" games that take up a lot of space, can probably be found on that, so I'll get them on there instead of on the PC. The PC has very little space left, since most of the drive is dedicated to the emulation archive. So that's useful.

The controller also is amazing. Best one I've ever used. So there's that.

Mostly though, almost all of my gaming has been on the PC for many years now.

 

[Lemon Zing]

Damn. I hope this doesn't happen on the PS3 store. They're selling Silent Hill dirt cheap.

I sold off the third one, and man. Have you checked eBay? Sealed copies are expensive AF.

 

[Princess Viola]

Sony already tried to shut down the PS3, PSP, and Vita stores back in 2021 but the backlash made them change their plans and decide to keep the PS3 and Vita stores online 'for the foreseeable future', while still shutting down the PSP store (although it should be noted that the native PlayStation Store on the PSP was already shut down back in 2016 but you could still make in-game purchases like DLC and buy PSP games on the PS3 and transfer them - this would just shut down those latter features).

And then they changed their plans again the day before the PSP store was going to be fully shut down and only shut down the ability to buy DLC for PSP games, you can still buy them on the PS3 and transfer them to the PSP or buy and play digital ones on the Vita just fine.

 

[FilterFreq]

Damn. I hope this doesn't happen on the PS3 store.

Don't worry; when the time comes, someone will have a really nice Pi Pico mod in the works . And if not, there will be some other way to get the games you paid for back onto your system.

When the 3DS store went down, my only thoughts were, "Nice, I had a backup plan anyway".

 

[Lemon Zing]

Physical copies are just way too costly, so go grab digital releases if you can. And I actually sold Clock Tower and gave the cash to my sister to help her out.

We had to go back days later, as they had to test the game because of its value.

 

[Princess Viola]

Don't worry; when the time comes, someone will have a really nice Pi Pico mod in the works . And if not, there will be some other way to get the games you paid for back onto your system.

When the 3DS store went down, my only thoughts were, "Nice, I had a backup plan anyway".

Tbf, at least when Nintendo shut down the 3DS and Wii U eShops (and also the Wii Shop Channel back in 2019), they made it clear that you'd be able to redownload what you'd already purchased for the foreseeable future.