Analysis: More than 220 digital games will disappear when the Xbox 360 Store closes

videogameschronicle.com:

More than 220 digital games will no longer be available for purchase when Microsoft closes the Xbox 360 Store next year, VGC analysis shows.

Although users will still be able to redownload their previous purchases for the foreseeable future, Microsoft has announced that after July 29, 2024, it will no longer be possible to buy any more games or DLC from the Xbox 360 Store.

This specifically means players won’t be able to buy content directly through the Xbox 360 console or from the Xbox 360 Marketplace site.

While many of these games will still be playable via other means, around 220 of them will essentially disappear forever.

There are currently nearly 500 games in the ‘Games on Demand’ section of the Xbox 360 Store. This section deals with games which also have physical releases.

While these will all disappear when the Xbox 360 Store closes, some of them will still be available to purchase digitally on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S stores, if they’re part of Xbox‘s backwards compatible games library.

For those not backwards compatible, it will of course still be possible to play these games by acquiring and using the disc versions. For now, then, none of these titles can truly be considered ‘lost’ – players will simply lose one way of playing them.

It’s the digital-only games in the store’s Xbox Live Arcade section that more are at risk of disappearing, since there’s no physical alternative.

Again, some of these will still be available for purchase on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S if they’re backwards compatible on those systems. Not all of them are, however.

Of the 619 titles currently listed in the Arcade section (in North America), only some are backwards compatible, and others have already been delisted but remain visible