The Xbox 360 is apparently 20 years old now, which also means I’m very old now given the high school age I was first playing one of those. I still have the one I got back then, which was actually the second I got around the same time since the first had to be returned due to a faulty disc drive, but it’s one of the post-Red-Ring models with built-in HDMI but before they totally redesigned the console. And I wasn’t using HDMI until later in college. It sure has an extensive library from being the system that came out first of that generation, plus it can run about half of the original Xbox games to some degree. The newer Xbox systems that came after could only run a smaller fraction of both libraries though, so there’s still plenty of reason to hang onto an actual 360 or even classic Xbox.
This is also around the timeframe I place the start of the current “modern gaming” era, where games started becoming more cinematic with increasing budgets and development times, and started having all sorts of DLC on top of that, and paid services in order to do any online gaming with consoles were starting to become more of a thing. The previous generation had its online subscriptions, including Xbox Live’s beginning, but the PS3 and Wii kept their online play free. Sony would be the next to start charging for that in general with the PS4, and Nintendo wouldn’t start until after the Switch launched.
As far as things that aren’t as annoying, this era also brought “full size” downloadable versions of retail games instead of them always just being much smaller exclusive games or retro throwbacks or parts of bigger games, with concern about storage size and download speeds being a thing, which the storage thing was a concern for longer with Nintendo systems given their still-limited on-board storage. Also achievements became a thing, which were pushed by the 360 first and the PS3 later got “Trophies” as a response, while Nintendo still hasn’t done anything of this sort system-wide.
So now that this rough marker of “modern gaming” is now that old, is it still modern? It still seems weird to consider anything from the 360 times and forward as “retro”, but that’s just something that comes with age. There’s much older folks who grew up with the first Atari home console or something else from that time. I started with the NES even though by that time it was already on its way out while the SNES was dealing with the Genesis. I also don’t consider the 360 itself to be the start of “modern gaming”, rather it brought forward and popularized a lot of what would define that for me. There were already these sorts of things going on before and even after its launch, like the rise of lootboxes, which my first encounter with those was on Team Fortress 2 on PC, toward the latter half of the 360’s active era, and then they started getting added into many more paid games as well as ones that started or became free-to-play until a bunch of European countries started outlawing them, then they had to figure out how to disguise them so they weren’t specificaly boxes but some other thing. Also free-to-play games themselves started coming to the forefront around this time.
I guess when I complain about “modern gaming”, I guess I’m complaining about the worst of mainstream games as they’ve been for a major part of my life. Of course not all games are these microtransaction-riddled Skinner boxes with a focus on revenue over being interesting and different, or at least fun to begin with, and not all have massive budgets rivaling or exceeding major movies. There is the nice convenience of being able to just download games from whoever without them having to worry about physical manufacturing costs and the end-user being able to have it within minutes, but that ended up coming with a major inconvenience of games just being delisted whenever the publisher either feels like it or doesn’t want to renew the rights to certain included things, usually the soundtrack or an attached property of some sort, as well as the possibility that a game could be updated to break something at a further point, either as part of removing expired licensed stuff or just because they’re jerks.
The digital versions also rarely cost less than physical when both are an option, unless they go on frequent sales online and the only other option is paying MSRP minus $5 USD at GameStop for a used copy. And now physical copies are becoming increasingly less so, many of which are now relying on a “patch” download that’s just the whole game, largely coming from any game under Microsoft’s umbrella at this point, especially Activision, as well as any Switch 2 “game key cards” being the Nintendo-endorsed format for their new system aimed at any third-party publishers wanting to put something in stores that’s just a little more than a code in a box. At least “game key cards” can be lended out at libraries as opposed to the waste of shelf space the nearly-empty box with a single-use code is.
This leaves the last concern as storage space, which has always been limited on Nintendo systems even compared to the base models of competitor systems of the previous generation, and I’m not sure if microSD Express cards will be getting cheaper anytime soon, but I feel like it’s nearly inevitable eventually unless some major thing goes down to permanently screw up prices. I don’t doubt that happening though. At the very least PC parts are only getting worse in price across the board for a current trend, and the apparent threat of that trend ending is total economic collapse according to a bunch of analysts. So maybe prices will normalize but nobody will have any money. Therefore everything becomes free in a sense. Or murder becomes the new currency, who knows. Long story short, play games that are fun while you’ve got the opportunity.