Apparently The Xbox 360 Is Still Being Supported

Even though we're about half a decade into the current generation of game consoles, the Xbox 360 is still chugging right along. In fact, Microsoft recently rolled out a new system update for the machine, the first to pop up in a couple of years.

Over on Microsoft's Xbox support blog, a recent post announced that a new system update for the Xbox 360 had been made available. When word first started circulating about the update, you wouldn't have been faulted for assuming someone had made a typo somewhere. After all, Microsoft ceased production on the machines about two years ago, with a March 2016 update presumed to be the system's final hoo-rah.

But, while Microsoft is no longer making the machines, it looks like they're still supporting it for the time being. So, if you've got an Xbox 360 still hooked up to your television for some semi-retro gaming every once in a blue moon, you might want to go ahead and turn it on soon in order to get the update downloaded. Better now than when you suddenly get an itch to play some old Halo or Gears games and, whoops, now you've got to wait on an update to get settled.

The blog post offers no information on what the update does outside of "minor bug fixes and improvements." We've done some tooling around the internet and nobody seems to have a clue what was actually updated. The theory gaining the most traction is that perhaps some hackers recently made some breakthroughs, and this is Microsoft's way of combating the console being used for unintended purposes. Then again, we're not sure that's something they'd worry about at this point.

Then again, all of the Xbox 360's online functionality is still up and running, including the Xbox Live Marketplace, so it makes sense that Microsoft might have to clean house every couple of years. It's probably easy to imagine that everyone has moved on to more modern consoles, but we figure there are plenty of people out there who are still happy to keep playing older Forza games and the like on their original hardware. Plus, thanks to backward compatibility on the Xbox One, some of those older games still have an active online community that spans the two console generations. That's especially handy for series like Call of Duty and Battlefield, with specific iterations really sticking with a certain branch of the community.

As for the competition, both the Wii U and PlayStation 3 kept going a bit longer than the Xbox 360, so their most recent system updates were last year. While we may see another PlayStation 3 system update at some point, we're pretty sure Nintendo has moved on completely from the Wii U, so don't expect any bug fixes or final tweaks anytime soon.