With the recent announcement that the Xbox 360 digital store will be closing next year, many have become concerned about the many games that will be lost due to not being available as backwards-compatible games. There may be some hope though as Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said the team at Xbox would “love to find solutions” in order to save the 220 games that are not backwards compatible that will become unavailable for purchase once the shutdown happens.
In a Eurogamer interview at Gamescom, Spencer said he has the list of non-backwards compatible games set to be lost in the shuffle “stapled” to his forehead and said that game preservation is “critical” to Team Xbox, and wants to ensure those games can remain playable in some form.
“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,”
He noted though, that this may simply mean those games are already available on PC, which he noted is “the best ecosystem for game preservation” due to not being tied to an old piece of hardware.
“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 center when all these decisions are made,”
As for the games that are not available on PC, Spencer stated that it was very important to give players a year’s notice on the Xbox 360 storefront shutdown so they can purchase those titles, and while there are no concrete plans yet, some solutions may be found in the next year to keep those non-backwards compatible games available.
Spencer also stated that Microsoft has decided to shut down the 360 storefront because of the “lifespan of the hardware” and the low numbers of users actually still playing and buying games on the Xbox 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 efforts on where the players are and where they can buy.'”
