Minecraft Is Finished With Legacy Consoles

Just picked up an Xbox 360 because it was dirt cheap at your local GameStop? Maybe you scavenged an old PS3 fat edition from out of a garage sale? Or heck, maybe your uncle gave you his old Wii U because he picked up a Switch? Well, don't expect much support from Minecraft on those legacy systems, because it's done. It's ending. It's finished.

Eurogamer is reporting that there has been one final update for the seventh generation edition of Minecraft for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, the PS Vita, and the Wii U. The update is based on a crossover promotion with The Nightmare Before Christmas, which features the addition of some of the characters and content from the popular Tim Burton film. The developers also added new trophies to the game, new cats, some panda mobs with different personality traits, some new scaffolding blocks, bamboo plants, new dyes, and several fixes for some crashes that would hamper the enjoyment of the game.

Obviously, though, the biggest piece of news surrounding this update is that it's the final update for the legacy consoles. Marking a six year run for Minecraft on the seventh generation home consoles, which isn't bad to say the least, given that that's one extra year worth of content support than what a typical console generation lasts (i.e., five years). What's also interesting is that Mojang and 4J Studios have been supporting Minecraft on the seventh-gen systems almost entirely throughout the eighth generation of gaming. So, whether you were playing on the older systems or the current ones, you were able to get the latest updates for the game.

The conclusion of support for the systems was met with a tweet as the bookend, as 4J Studios announced that the team is packing up and ready to ship back all of the development kits for the legacy consoles.

Eurogamer noted that on the Xbox 360 alone there have been more than 21 million Minecraft players over the last six and a half years and more than 73 title updates.

The article also points out that this isn't news that came out of the blue. Microsoft -- who now owns Mojang and the Minecraft brand after purchasing it for $2.5 billion way back in 2014 -- announced earlier in the year that the last major expansion would be the Aquatic update, which added a number of new biomes, blocks, and tools for exploring the underwater aspects of the Minecraft world. The reason for eventually pulling support was that the previous gen consoles supposedly only made up less than 5% of the current active playerbase for Minecraft, and it was eventually going to start costing more to support the legacy consoles than the amount of revenue that those consoles generated for Minecraft... or, so Microsoft says.

The series is still going strong on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, mobile devices, PC, and the Nintendo Switch. So, if you're inclined to check the game out you can still do so on all of the more recent gaming platforms on the market. But, if you're still rocking those old seventh-gen monsters, the Nightmare Before Christmas update will be the final update for those systems.