Don’t worry Xbox 360 users, you’ll still have functioning servers this year.
[dropcap size=small]I[/dropcap]f you haven’t noticed already, the seventh generation of gaming consoles is widely regarded to be over. This means that the consoles like Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3 are going to see less and less freshly released games available for playability and it is because of this that rumors have spread that Microsoft would be shutting down their Xbox 360 servers.
Luckily, Xbox 360 owners who were worried that their days of gaming online would be over took to Twitter to ask Microsoft’s head of gaming, Phil Spencer, to answer the question that was on everybody’s mind, is the end of Xbox 360 online gaming upon us? According to Phil Spencer, no it is not. At least not right now anyway.
@0RIGINALENERGY Not true.
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) January 16, 2016
To put all of this into perspective for you as to why the rumors started spreading, Microsoft decided to close down Xbox Live availability to the original Xbox roughly ten years after the console was first released. Right now, the Xbox 360 recently celebrated its tenth anniversary this past November and back in 2013 Microsoft’s marketing executive, Yusuf Mehdi, stated that the company would continue to support the Xbox 360 due to how profitable the console had been for the company for another three years at least, so there is some understanding as to why Xbox 360 users were starting to worry if they wouldn’t be able to play online anymore.
While Phil Spencer did deny the rumors that Xbox 360 servers were going to be shut down, there is no denying the inevitability of it all. Consoles like the Playstation 4 (which was the highest selling gaming console of 2015) and Xbox One have dominated the electronic entertainment industry and when more games are announced at this year’s E3 you can be certain that nearly all of the games will be only available for Xbox One and Playstation 4. So if you have a Xbox 360 be sure to give it some attention, you never quite know what you have until it’s gone.
