343 Industries has announced in its latest Halo Waypoint blogpost that it's planning to shut the majority of online services for all Halo Xbox 360 games in December 2021, and digital sales are being halted right now.
In the post, the company explained that "less and less people are investing time" in these titles, and that "every cycle spent maintaining and supporting Xbox 360 legacy services is time and energy not spent on the future of Halo."
"To date, we’ve juggled future-facing work and priorities with continued upkeep of Halo’s Xbox 360 legacy services. Maintaining these legacy services today requires significant time and resources which directly impacts the studio’s ability to support current and future projects like Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite."
In a FAQ, the company explained that (naturally) you'll still be able to enjoy most of these games online as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection instead, and in the case of Achievements, "the impact will vary by title as any that specifically require matchmaking and challenges will no longer be obtainable."
Furthermore, 343 says that official digital sales of these Xbox 360 games are now being discontinued from this month, so you won't be able to pick up a brand-new copy in either digital or physical format moving forward.
What do you make of this decision? Give us your thoughts in the comments.
[source halowaypoint.com]
Comments 17
No surprise here. Plus most of these games are in the MCC. And the rest have Xbox One versions.
That’s good to hear, and see they understand to move resources to the future games and move forward. This will be good for Halo all round.
Props to Microsoft for maintaining them this long. The last time I tried joining a halo 4 game was about two years ago and it took a LONG time to find a match.
Surprised they've supported them this long considering everything is included in the MCC.
Can we still play halo wars and Spartan assault single player on game pass? I never got around to playing those games
Does this only apply to the Xbox 360 versions? So this doesn't affect all these Halo games in the MCC?
Shutting down the online services makes sense but why delist them? Its not like it takes work to leave them available
@Snake_V5 correct!
@LX_FENIX I guess they really want people to move to MCC that haven’t yet. I thought it was strange as well to delist them. Some people want the original experience in the campaigns and you can still use LAN to play multiplayer.
@Snake_V5 Doesn't affect the MCC at all.
@ralphdibny The XB1 versions are in Game Pass which aren't affected at all by the Xbox 360 shutdowns.
@Grumblevolcano nice one, cheers
It's only a matter of time when the 360 servers are shut down..
@Bmartin001 I hope not. I just bought an Xbox 360 so that I can play all the Xbox 360 games because a lot of them aren't backwards compatible on Xbox One.
@Bmartin001
I doubt that will happen as backwards compatibility is still huge to the Xbox ecosystem & the 360 is a gigantic part of that.
Things like this happen because there is the MCC out there, which makes the individual 360 Halo games a bit redundant.
So lame. I pop in reach on my 360 fairly routinely still.
All of these are in the MCC collection or on the Xbox One, not much of a loss as I imagine there was hardly anyone playing them online on the 360 these days anyways.
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