The digital Xbox 360 store — and its web counterpart, the Xbox 360 Marketplace — will close for good on July 29. The next 12 days are the last chance you have to buy certain Xbox 360 games digitally, or even at all, and they offer an opportunity to take advantage of big discounts on titles that continue to be playable via backward compatibility on Xbox Series X and Xbox One.
To mark the occasion (and squeeze a final bit of cash from the store), Microsoft is offering price reductions on a wide range of Xbox 360 titles. The discounts are pretty steep, starting at a minimum of 40%, with many, many games available at 80-90% off.
How about a vintage piece of mid-2000s double-A dirtbag action, Io Interactive’s Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, for $2.99? Or Monolith’s Lord of the Rings game, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, with its brilliant but seldom-imitated Nemesis System, for $4.99?
Xbox 360 games that have been added to Microsoft’s backward compatibility program aren’t going anywhere — they will remain available through the Xbox One and Xbox Series X store. However, the sale offers an opportunity to pick up some of these games on the cheap to play on newer consoles, since the Xbox 360 Marketplace purchases will transfer over to your current Xbox library. For example, you could get the over-the-top, punchy first-person shooter Black for a whopping $0.99, or the excellent stealth game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for $2.99.
As ever, the closure of a console’s digital store is an issue for game preservation. Any Xbox 360 game that had a physical release will remain purchasable on the used market, but the sale includes some digital-only releases that are about to disappear into the ether forever (in their Xbox 360 versions, anyway), including Mega Man tribute Mighty No. 9 ($2.99) and platformer Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams ($3.74).
Hopefully, this wave of digital store closures is the last time we’ll see big tranches of gaming history disappear like this. Steam has reset players’ expectations around the permanence of their digital libraries, and from the PlayStation 4/Xbox One generation onward — hopefully including Nintendo Switch — the platform holders seem to be committed to forward compatibility, and keeping the game libraries of past platforms alive. For now, though, you should make the most of the availability of digital Xbox 360 games while you still can.