Last night I fired up one of my Xbox 360’s for a little bit of gaming before bed. I was rather surprised when I did turn the console on to discover I had a system update waiting.
This would be the first update in 2 years, to a console that’s well past end of life – it’s basically a zombie console, with the Xbox Live service still supported on it, but nothing much at all in the way of new titles being released (aside from the odd sports game, probably.) With many of the most played titles on the Xbox 360 being playable on the Xbox One, most people have let their 360’s collect dust, or have outright sold them off.
For those who still have and use their 360’s, however, this update does come as a surprise, but it doesn’t seem to change much of anything. The Microsoft Website lists the update as being for “minor bug fixes and improvements” but given the time it released at, on May 22nd, I’m pretty sure it has to do with the GDPR and the changes it makes to data collection / data privacy laws in the European Union.
When the update was finished installing, the system asked me a question about data collection which I didn’t recall being present for previous updates, which makes me suspect this was the root cause of this updates release at this time. I don’t doubt it has some improvements somewhere down the line, but at the core I’m almost sure there was some kind of GDPR related update to the systems back-end that couldn’t be changed without an update to the consoles themselves.
There isn’t anything special to say about this, I just wanted to throw my thoughts on he odd timing of this update, something others who have discussed this update seem to have not considered.
If you still have that old 360 sitting around, fire it up, update it, and play a game or 2 that you haven’t fired up in a while. 🙂