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Microsoft XBox (Games) Games

Microsoft Stops Xbox 360 Production, Servers To Stay Online 75

Posted by msmash from the it's-time-to-let-go dept.
Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it has stopped manufacturing new Xbox 360 consoles. "Xbox 360 means a lot to everyone in Microsoft," wrote Phil Spencer, Xbox chief. "And while we've had an amazing run, the realities of manufacturing a product over a decade old are starting to creep up on us." The company says that it will, obviously, continue to sell the existing inventory of Xbox 360, a gaming console it launched on November 22, 2005. Xbox 360 game servers will also remain functional, the company said. Microsoft also assured that services such as Games with Gold and Deals with Gold will continue on Xbox 360, and if your console runs into a hardware issue, Xbox Support will take care of it. The Xbox 360 is currently available for purchase at $199.99, for a 500GB model with a copy of Forza Horizon 2. Microsoft added Xbox 360 backward compatibility to its current generation Xbox One console last year.
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Microsoft Stops Xbox 360 Production, Servers To Stay Online More

Microsoft Stops Xbox 360 Production, Servers To Stay Online

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  • Better headline: (Score:3, Funny)

    by fibonacci8 ( 260615 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @12:27PM (#51948189)
    Microsoft does a 360 then walks away.

    • Yeah, that would be a better headline, except if they did a 360, they would still be walking forward. ;)

    • A real better headline (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @02:17PM (#51949515)

      Microsoft Stops Xbox 360 Production, Servers To Stay Online FOR NOW

      • As long as it's lucrative. No company in the right mind would leave servers on at a loss. What I think is more important is what will they do when they decide to disconnect the servers. Will they offer 3rd parties to take it over or will they just let it die. I figure we will know within 5 years.

        • No company in the right mind would leave servers on at a loss.

          I don't agree... if Microsoft is smart, they will leave the 360 servers on until the XBox Two (or whatever it is called) comes out.

          There is value in appearing to support your products for longer than when you just sell them. It gives assurance to people buying an XBox One today that it will get support until the XBox Three comes out.

          • There's also the thing where people are paying for those servers via live subscriptions. They can't disconnect them at all even if they wanted to.

            • There's also the thing where people are paying for those servers via live subscriptions. They can't disconnect them at all even if they wanted to.

              When the forecast that the revenue from the subscriptions will be lower than (cost + minimum markup), then they will announce "end of service" and will prevent subscription renewals. They are allowed to do it and they will at some point. What I'm more interested in knowing is if they'll offer 3rd parties the opportunity to take it over.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            I don't agree... if Microsoft is smart, they will leave the 360 servers on until the XBox Two (or whatever it is called) comes out.

            There is value in appearing to support your products for longer than when you just sell them. It gives assurance to people buying an XBox One today that it will get support until the XBox Three comes out.

            Well, the only reason Microsoft killed Live for the original Xbox was limitations that were causing issues for the Xbox360 Live users (limited Friends list, etc). So Microsoft d

          • if Microsoft is smart, they will leave the 360 servers on until the XBox Two (or whatever it is called) comes out.

            Good companies will sit with key people, asses current cost, ongoing revenue from services and estimate the marketing benefits of going beyond expectations.
            The marketing assessment is probably the most important part. They need to understand their demographic. If only 2% of their user base is still using the old servers, how many of them can we rally back in with the next gen Xbox?

            They need to identify the following:
            - Server hosting cost (equipment, power, staff, engineers and software developers). It costs

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shione ( 666388 )

          Just look at what this same company did when they abandoned games for windows live and you have your answer there.

          • So I guess XBox360 users have good times to look forward to considering games for windows live is still up for those who own games on that platform.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by shione ( 666388 )

              Do you use games for windows live because I don't think you do. ms took down the gfwl authentication servers a while ago. You can still download your games but the online part is broken unless you patch it to run another distribution service like steam where the developers have made such a patch. Even then, it's a hit and miss what still works. For example when you bring resident evil 5 over to steam you still lose online co-op. ms really dropped the ball on consumers and developers/publishers alike when th

      • I doubt they will go down anytime soon. MS just released Left 4 Dead 2 as backwards compatible on XBONE like 2 weeks ago. And many backwards compatible games they have released already heavily depend on those servers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by timftbf ( 48204 )

        I wonder as well how they're splitting the plan between game servers and content servers.

        I don't give two hoots about online multiplayer, it just doesn't interest me, but I'd like to still be able to download patches and DLC. There are games I'd like to play that I either haven't bought yet, or have bought but haven't yet got around to playing...

  • They were still making them? I would have thought they would have killed it off as soon as XB1 came out.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Higaran ( 835598 )
      I agree, I would have thought that at the most once the XB1 was a year old they would have stopped, just use up most of the parts they already had ordered or something.
    • It's particularly surprising because they had presumably wrung all the BoM reductions out of the design that they were reasonably going to be able to (barring a likely-but-unhelpful "we'll be able to implement the entire thing in a single $3 chip in 20 years!" stuff). They had already increased the integration of the major chips, done several redesigns of the board and chassis, and tinkered with what ports and peripherals were and weren't included.

      Unless they were willing to go all in for a legacy produc
      • Adoption of XBox Ones was rather slow, with the stupid mandatory Kinect feature, and the "must phone-home" feature which was later abandoned after negative feedback from the market. They kept the X360s going to keep their revenue-stream going.

        • Adoption of XBox Ones was rather slow

          Similar rate to the PS4 just lower number due to the foreign market favoring Japanese products over American.
          Reference: http://bgr.com/2015/02/18/ps4-... [bgr.com]

          with the stupid mandatory Kinect feature, and the "must phone-home" feature

          For most buyers it was a bonus, not a downfall. I can't find the numbers but they got tones more female users than PS4. The main reason was the dance games available at release. WII obviously has the biggest female fan base.

          The "must phone home was" more a /. complaint than a main stream complaint. Don't take me wrong, it did become concern for all because

    • There's usually a market for successful consoles (and the 360 was successful) for a couple of years after their successors are launched, particularly if that successor has no or limited back compatibility.

      It's basically about people buying replacements for broken consoles. The 360 has never, to put it mildly, had a good reputation for reliability (even if later versions were much better than the early ones). People will have large software libraries for their 360s, much of which is still not playable on the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        Speaking of the playstation, the mini PSOne came out after the PS2 (in Japan) and proceeded to outsell it for the rest of the year.

  • I'm not a gamer but I am curious what the demand for this console is considering the next generation system has been available for several years?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Jozxyqk ( 16657 )

      There are still some media-center uses for the 360 that haven't (yet?) carried over to the XbOne.

    • Re:Demand? (Score:4)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @12:41PM (#51948371) Homepage

      It's cheap. and there is a buttload of dirt cheap used and low price games out there for it.

      Honestly it's why the Playstation 2 sold really well for 2 years after the 3 came out.

      • The PS2 was still selling fairly well, for an old console, in 2012! It sold better than the Vita! IIRC, they stopped selling them a year later.

      • Yeah, this. For all the crap Microsoft get around here, the 360 was a very decent entry in the console family tree. The comparisons to the PS2 are quite apt.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The $200 price tag, mostly. In the past it was a good idea to wait until around now in the product cycle to pick up a console, when it's cheap and the market is flooded with used games that were dumped in favor of the new generation. Of course, with online play being important to so many games now, it's not as good of a deal as it used to be. Even if the servers are still up and you can play online with a used copy, the communities will be mostly dead.

    • This is a good site for tracking console sales: www.vgchartz.com [vgchartz.com]

      According to their data, approximately 6000 XBox 360s were sold in one week.

      How many PS3 systems were sold in a week? Over 9000!!

      But these numbers are a tenth of the sales compared to the newer generation systems.

  • Those stingy bastards

  • I have absolutely zero faith MS will keep these servers alive for more than a year and a half. I assume by this time 2018 they will be sending notice all Xbox 360 game servers will be shutting down. They'll keep them running just long enough to sell their overstock.

  • Backwards compatible? Not really (Score:5, Informative)

    by T.E.D. ( 34228 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @02:46PM (#51949895)

    The "backwards compatibility" is nothing but a big steaming pile of marketing.. Xbox One isn't even in the slightest backwards compatible with 360 games.

    Instead, what they are doing is slowly porting 360 games to the Xbox One, one by one. If you happen to have a 360 game on their list of ported games [ign.com], you put the CD in the Xbox, just to prove you actually own it. Then the Xbox One will download the entire ported game from their servers to its hard-drive, and allow you to play it.

    Don't go buying an Xbox One thinking you can use any old Xbox 360 game you might own. 3 moths ago we did that, and found a whopping 0 of our old 360 games had been ported.

    Someone remind me what the word is when you purposely inaccurately describe something, because it will make your product sound more appealing than the accurate description will? I forget these days.

    • Sony is doing the same, except they're charging full price for those ports.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nyder ( 754090 )

      ...

      Someone remind me what the word is when you purposely inaccurately describe something, because it will make your product sound more appealing than the accurate description will? I forget these days.

      Fraud.

    • This non-backwards-compatible also extends to hardware - if you have any custom 360 wired controllers they don't work at all with the Xbox One.

    • This is simply not true. They are NOT porting the games one at a time at all, what they are doing is they have what is effectively a virtual machine running which needs to be tweaked and tuned to handle each game individually as the architecture between the 360 and the one is so significantly different. The games themselves are NOT being ported.

    • Someone remind me what the word is when you purposely inaccurately describe something, because it will make your product sound more appealing than the accurate description will? I forget these days.

      Lies.

    • and found a whopping 0 of our old 360 games had been ported.

      How many are currently available?

      Also, can you reference ANYTHING Microsoft has ever put out that would make anybody think that there wasn't a whitelist of compatible games? The Xbox BC for the 360 was the same way, as I recall, though I think it was more a whitelist of games tested as working satisfactorily.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

        Also, can you reference ANYTHING Microsoft has ever put out that would make anybody think that there wasn't a whitelist of compatible games?

        Sorry, but I am not your personal Google monkey. Pay me for my time, or go do your own research.

        Its really pretty simple. They used the term "Backward Compatability". Yes, Microsoft itself calls it that. That term has a meaning. What they have done does not match that meaning. These are all facts.

        What people (yourself included) do with this information is their own business.

        • Sorry, but I am not your personal Google monkey. Pay me for my time, or go do your own research.

          Actually, the correct answer is 'No, I cannot reference anything Microsoft has ever said that would indicate that it was a universal, automatic thing for every title. They've always made it clear that it was exactly the opposite.'

    • If they were actually porting games they would be spending a fortune and you would be getting 1-2 games per year. It's definitely a backwards compatibility emulation layer.

      All emulators need validation. There are so many undocumented hacks and tricks developers use that there is no perfect emulator. So they need to test the game and release patches to ensure there aren't any game breaking quirks. That takes a little bit of time but it's not a "port" which would mean rewriting for the new platform. Loa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

        All emulators need validation. ... Load up any emulator's website like SCUMM and you'll see a list of games that work and games that have problems and games that flat out don't work.

        In fact, that's one of the dead giveaways. For a true emulator, that's the kind of list you'd expect; here's software that works, here's software that is known not to work, here's software that works but has issues, and anything not listed is unknown.

        If things are ported one-by-one, you'd expect just a simple list of what works. Which is exactly what MS has.

        Also, if they were simply emulating off of a VM, you'd be playing the games that work off of your CD, and you might even be able to try some that are

  • >> Xbox 360 game servers will also remain functional
    mmmh Yeah. Does the 360 run Linux ?

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