Microsoft announced this morning that it would cease the production of the Xbox 360, its famous video-game console. On Wednesday morning, the chief of Xbox Phil Spencer posted the announcement on the company’s primary blog.
Even when the Xbox 360 system production has officially ceased, the remaining 360 consoles will continue to be sold in stores, just as the Xbox Live-related services and connectivity for current 360 users will continue to function. A release for current gamers considering that the company’s rival PlayStation shut down the servers for the PS2 recently.
Spencer didn’t specify how many 360 systems were sold in almost 11 years of life, but it’s known that the company has, at least, surpassed the 84 million sales mark announced back in 2014. The prolonged lifespans of both Xbox 360 and PS3’s are a consequence of the economic crash of 2008. But using the Xbox 360 over the last decade came with some benefits, such as witnessing the accelerate evolution of home-entertainment industry, which includes digital distribution, streaming video, and micro-transactions chief among the adaptations, and all in the same console.
“While we’ve had an amazing run, the realities of manufacturing a product over a decade old are starting to creep up on us,” Spencer wrote in his announcement.
The Xbox 360’s ‘golden age’
The first Xbox 360s was launched in November of 2005, and even when the Xbox One was launched eight years after the original, the 360 survived with its hardware unchanged. This is a remarkable achievement for the Microsoft-owned company given the rapid pace of technological devices over the past decade. In theory, the Xbox 360 should be already discontinued, but it’s not. Instead, the Xbox 360 had a successful 10-years-journey. It was one of the first consoles to employ substantial online functionality throughout its system for purposes other than multiplayers. Outstandingly, it also popularized the digital distribution of the gaming marketplace to what its known nowadays.
Xbox Live Arcade turned the notion of games available simultaneously digital an on physical disc into a commonplace. Despite the updates of One, the 360 still offered surprises over the years because of software dashboard updates, which saw the console’s interface transition from a “blade” series of panels to an avatar-dominated, Metro-loaded mess of logos and advertisements.
The Xbox 360 was also the first major living-room box to support Netflix on-demand streaming, and the system wound up being used more for video streaming than online multiplayer. Xbox 360 was a pioneer in many fields of video-games consoles.
Source: Ars Technica