The Xbox Arcade gives us a glimpse into a world of dead software

We took another step closer to the end of the Xbox 360 earlier this year, and you’d be forgiven for missing it. Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 store and marketplace would be closing its virtual doors for the last time, leaving its content inaccessible, and inadvertently giving us into a glimpse of what a future of purely digital assets might look like.

This future looks bleak, with difficult, if not impossible, to preserve digital assets, leaving consumers with no legal method of acquiring a game they paid their hard-earned money for. We’ll take a look at what this bleak future might look like, and some attempts to save older games.

Download your content while you can

It won’t be available forever

While it was widely publicized online that the Xbox Store and Marketplace would be shutting down, its inevitable that some people have missed it. Any purchased DLCs, Xbox Arcade games, and other content won’t be downloadable anymore, effectively killing the Xbox 360’s first-party online services. As Microsoft detailed in their announcement, and as mentioned in this great Reddit megathread on the shutdown, this effectively means that all content not stored on your hard drive when the store goes dark will no longer be (legally) accessible.

This marks a big first, as the Xbox 360 was one of the first consoles with a purely ‘download only’ selection of games, beating out the Playstation 3’s store by a few months. The platform was broadly considered a success, and as of 2016, there had been 719 Xbox Arcade titles released, ranging from the weird and wonderful to genuinely excellent smaller titles (and even PC classics like… CS:GO?). An online only digital store isn’t a first for gaming – the likes of Steam and Direct2Drive existed several years before the Xbox Arcade store (est. 2003 and 2004 respectively). Besides, it certainly wasn’t the first time games were available to download over the internet. But the increased difficulty in preserving console games, as well as the unavailability of physical alternative copies (back in 2004 most Steam Games were available as separate physical copies), makes this one of the first examples of a digital store where most of the content lacks a physical alternative.

This is important, as the rarity of physical copies of a game has in the past increased their value, previously making them more attractive to collectors, who in turn help preserve them. This dynamic is set to be lost for modern console games.

Is the Xbox Arcade a glimpse of the future – or the present?

You’ll own nothing and be happy about it

There’s been a gargantuan effort to preserve the contents of the Xbox Arcade store, but this does give us an unfortunate glimpse into what is to come for gaming. As physical copies of games become more and more scarce (whether they physically exist at all, or only in smaller and smaller numbers), accessing older games once servers and content stores have shut down will only get harder. The Xbox Arcade has fired the starting pistol in a battle for content preservation, without a clear end in sight. More and more effort will need to be put into backing up and preserving games that might otherwise be entirely lost or become unplayable without community support. As content stores eventually close, the problem is only amplified by the increasing move to ‘always-online’ licensing in video games, where the game won’t boot without a connection to a licensing server.

Most of these platforms providing digital downloads employ strict DRM support to make ripping their games for preservation difficult, and offer no guarantees on how long the platform will continue to be available. This is only exacerbated as modern consoles are increasingly moving away from physical media entirely (the recent announcement of the PS4 Pro called it “the most powerful PlayStation Console,” despite the fact it has no disk drive).

This is already happening

We’re already seeing this in action on other platforms. Ubisoft generated significant controversy earlier this year by deleting copies of its online-first multiplayer game The Crew from users’ accounts, citing a server shutdown as the reason. Admittedly, not many people were playing the game, but the practicality is that customers shouldn’t need to continue playing a game in order to continue to own it. Users online were frustrated at what many considered to be theft – the company removal of property that a customer had paid for upfront, after the fact, and without recompense.

The legalities of this don’t favor consumers. Licensing requirements for games usually stipulate that support could be withdrawn at any time, and that the user is effectively leasing a game from a store. Regulators, however, have started paying attention – noting that buying a game implies ownership, not just medium-term licensing. California is leading the way here, with a new bill introduced in the aftermath of Ubisoft’s debacle requiring retailers to inform consumers that digital products can be taken away at any time. However, this still doesn’t protect against store shutdowns, and given the lack of alternative physical options, it’s now just “the evil you know.”

We haven’t even gotten into the slightly more controversial topic of game server availability, where plenty of games have had their servers shutdown without binaries ever being released, effectively killing the multiplayer element of the game. This has long been a pain point among communities, leading to several extensive reverse-engineering projects completed in order to save the multiplayer functionality of beloved online games.

The PC isn’t innocent either

Source: Wikimedia Commons

While the Xbox Arcade was one example, don’t assume that PC players are safe either. Steam has dominated the market for PC game distribution for years, and while it’s widely considered a pretty stable platform, this again offers no guarantees at all. PC digital distribution gets a slightly easier ride than consoles, largely due to the (at least perception of) lighter DRM and platform restrictions. The same concerns apply though, and there’s nothing preventing your software and DLCs from disappearing once it’s no longer in the developers’ best interest.

Game licensing is in a sticky spot

The Xbox Arcade is only likely the start of this conversation, as we enter a generation where widely distributed digital content may no longer be available. We have no guarantees on how long we’ll be able to access a game we’ve purchased, and as we enter an era where games might not exist on physical media, this is only going to get harder and harder. While the internet never forgets, the volume of work needed to remember and preserve the playability of older titles is going to increase significantly, and inevitably, there will be consequences as games are lost to time, disinterest, and server shutdowns.

Game licensing is tricky – publishers obviously need to protect their IP somehow, but consumers are often left holding the raw end of the stick when a game developer quits, goes broke, or just decides enough is enough. This problem won’t go away soon, and while regulators are starting to take note of the most nefarious infractions against gamers, more action is still needed. For many, preserving games should be considered as important as preserving other art forms, whether it be books, paintings, TV or music. Unfortunately, this is an attitude that isn’t often shared by corporations.