Xbox 360 Digital Store — and its online counterpart, Xbox 360 Market — will close for good on July 29. The next 12 days are your last chance to buy some Xbox 360 games digitally or at all, as well as a chance to take advantage of gigantic discounts on titles that are still playable via Backward Compatibility on Xbox Series X and Xbox One.
To celebrate (and squeeze the last of its money out of the store), Microsoft is offering price cuts on a wide range of Xbox 360 games. Discounts are quite high, starting at a minimum of 40%, with many games available at 80-90% discount.
How about a classic mid-2000s double-A action piece from Io Interactive? Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, for $2.99? Or the Monolith Lord of the Rings game, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordorwith its brilliant but rarely imitated Nemesis system, for $4.99?
Xbox 360 games that have been added to Microsoft’s Backward Compatibility program aren’t going anywhere — they’ll still be available in the Xbox One and Xbox Series X store. However, the sale does offer a chance to pick up some of these games at low prices to play on newer consoles, as Xbox 360 Marketplace purchases will be transferred to your existing Xbox library. For example, you can buy an over-the-top, fast-paced first-person shooter Black Down huge $0.99or an excellent stealth game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for $2.99.
As usual, the closure of the console’s digital store is a problem for the survival of games. Every Xbox 360 game that had a physical release will remain available for purchase on the secondary market, but the sale also includes some digital-only releases that will soon disappear into the ether forever (at least on the Xbox 360 versions), including a tribute to Mega Man Mighty No. 9 ($2.99) and platformer Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams ($3.74).
Hopefully, this wave of digital store closures will be the last time we see enormous chunks of gaming history disappear in this way. Steam has reset players’ expectations about the longevity of their digital libraries, and since the PlayStation 4/Xbox One generation — hopefully including the Nintendo Switch — platform owners have seemed determined to ensure future compatibility and keep libraries of games from previous platforms alive. For now, though, you should make the most of the digital availability of games on Xbox 360 while you still can.