There's a major XBox 360 sale

[Dark Jaguar]

And it's going on right now.  If you have any digital-only content you want to get, now's the chance before the store shuts down for good.  This one's going to take even more content down than the 3DS did, so now's the time to move.

Or you can hoist the colors once it's down.  Frankly that's an understandable move I can't see a moral fault with.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, I got a bunch of stuff.  There are some annoying glitches that have broken buying on desktop for a lot of people, me included, but I got some on PC before things broke and then more on my X360 after it did.  MS has made it difficult by removing the page that listed all games on sale and by not marking on the actual console which games are marked down, but the X360 doesn't have all that many downloadable games so getting through the list is easy enough.  This isn't a modern console with its dozens of games releasing every week...

Or rather, the X360 DID have that kind of store in its Xbox Live Indie Games store for X360, but for some reason that was shut down quite a few years ago.  I never understood why.
 
It's really unfortunate that they are taking the X360 store down, though, they should just fix its problems instead of closing it.  It's yet another reminder of how awful digital preservation is and how little companies actually care about keeping things legally accessible.

[Dark Jaguar]

As of right now, the only store older than the generation before this one that will remain up is Sony's.  I have to give them credit.  While they WANTED to shut it all down, they kept it up well past expected timelines.  I don't expect that to last.  They've probably been waiting until the competition shut their's down first.  But, as of right now, if you want to buy PS3, PSVita, or PSP content (through a few loops on that last one admittedly), you still can.

As for online play, that still will remain up on 360, but that's doomed to get taken down soon too.  They already killed off the whole Halo franchise primarily to push sales of "Hello: The Mister Chef Concoction" on newer consoles.  I smell EXACTLY what they were cooking when they did that.  PS3 still has working online play, but again, that's limited.

Hacking is the only way to restore function on these older online consoles, and I'm very glad hackers have found ways to reverse engineer so much.  I just wish it wasn't necessary.  As you say, no care is extended whatsoever for preservation.  The individual game designers may care about their work, but the people running these corporations don't care one bit.  Look at how Nintendo treats their retro games.  Sure, I love the work they did remaking some of their titles recently, but the "virtual console" is a money-grubbing joke wherein I have to pay a yearly fee to get access to a bunch of ROMs with NO way to actually buy any of the games outright.  That means the moment Switch online goes dark, all of those virtual console games won't be playable at all, short of hacking the console to remove the check-in restriction.

[A Black Falcon]

When it comes to online play, all games that are BC on X1/XS are going to stay available.  Many X360 games aren't BC, but a decent number are including many games that do still have working online play.  I think this might lead MS to leave the X360 online servers up.

[Dark Jaguar]

The original Halo games are BC on XBox One/Series.  They aren't online.

Just saying that time's limited on that.  MS stopped updating backwards compatibility a while ago.  I doubt they see it as all that important any more.

[Dark Jaguar]

So many deep sales now in this final week before the XBox 360 store turns off the lights for good.  They're worth looking into, since the 360 is a notoriously hard to hack console (requiring a physical mod to work around it's tight security).

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, I've gotten a bunch of games and there definitely are some good sales.  I'm sure I'll get a few more but not that many, I have a lot already and as I said before the X360 minus its XBLIG store just doesn't have the kind of massive volume of digital releases that a newer console would... which here is kind of a relief, heh. 

On a related note though, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but this year physical X360 games have spiked in price.  A lot of games that used to be really cheap are expensive now.  There are some I wish I'd gotten...

[Dark Jaguar]

Oh?  Anything interesting on that list?  I only just last year picked up a brand new unopened copy of Infinite Undiscovery (complete with it's DLC code) for about $15, and at this point the only 360 games I even want to bother with are it's exclusives.

I did that last year when I realized the N64 games were all jumping up drastically in price, so I ran off to the next console down the line with it's games selling for still low prices.  I also picked up a number of unopened Wii games for ridiculously low prices, like Castlevania Judgment (I stand in judgment of their decisions characterizing the actual child Maria in that game... but that's another topic).  When I was noticing so many SNES and NES games drastically jumping up in price, I moved onto ancient PC game collecting for about a year before suddenly they started jumping up too.

I think you made the right call.  These things come in waves.  Ride to the next one any time the price jumps come.

[Dark Jaguar]

Well, it's down, and this is by far the BIGGEST online store to go down yet.  The XBox 360 store was, frankly, massive, encompassing basically every single game ever released on the very popular system.  Indeed, the 360 is the most popular console Microsoft has ever had.  This was simply a huge takedown.  Now, near as I can tell online services still remain.  Voice chat, parties, and multiplayer for (most) games are still functional, for now.  It's rather surprising to see the store go down BEFORE the other online services, considering the normal order of events we've seen from Nintendo.  Indeed, the original XBox took down the store and online functions at the exact same time back in the day.

Soon enough, Sony is going to pull the trigger I'm sure.  They meant to a few years ago but pushed it back due to customer demand.

I'm unsure whether to hack my 360 now or wait until the online services go down entirely.  One thing DID change.  All those ads all over the current 360 interface?  They're gone.  It's purely utilitarian function now, plus the feature to redownload content you've already downloaded.  I also noticed that the listing of registered consoles on my Microsoft account no longer shows any 360 hardware, and the function to "move" my digital purchases to another console are now gone.  I'm glad I finally moved everything to the most stable version of the XBox 360 S last year, before the option to do so vanished entirely.

[A Black Falcon]

So yeah, I ended up spending a bunch on 360 stuff, a lot of it on DLC, the final day.  I almost escaped with my money intact but cracked on the last day... heh.  Sadly there are a few more I should have gotten but missed, such as the DLC for Rare's Kinect Sports Season 2.  Bah.  You can still add free DLCs to your account, but not pay for ones that cost money, so I can't get them now.  And they haven't made anything free that wasn't, of course.

The problem with hacking a 360 is, it requires a modchip soldered to the motherboard, right?  I'd love to have it but that would be challenging...

Anyway, this was certainly a very large shutdown, but there's no way it was as large as the Wii U + 3DS combined, and those were shut down at the same time.  It's awful and incredibly disappointing that MS shut down the system and have basically left 360's nearly useless now, how about letting people mod it more easily or something?  Heh. 

As for why some of the services are still online, I'd imagine that some are for the X360 games that are still playable on newer Xboxes.  Why shut down the online servers when those same servers are likely also hosting the BC games?