It’s the end of an era. Next month, the servers will go down for all Halo games on the Xbox 360. While the single-player functions will remain available, multiplayer will no longer be accessible. For now, it’s only Halo’s servers that are affected, but we wouldn’t be surprised if this is the beginning of the end of Xbox Live support for the 360.
What Xbox 360 Halo servers are shutting down?
As announced on the official blog, on January 13, 2022, all the Halo games for Xbox 360 will lose online functionality as their servers are taken down. This includes:
- Halo: Reach
- Halo 4
- Halo 3
- Halo 3: ODST
- Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
- Spartan Assault
- Halo Wars
The following features will continue to work for these games after the servers go offline:
Halo: CE Anniversary
- Campaign
- LAN
- Splitscreen
Halo 3
- Campaign
- Custom Games
- Forge
- LAN
- Online Squads
- Player Customization
- Service Record
- Splitscreen
Halo 3: ODST
- Campaign
- Firefight
- LAN
- Online Squads
- Player Customization
- Service Record
- Splitscreen
Halo 4
- Campaign
- Custom Games
- Forge
- LAN
- Online Squads
- Spartan Ops
- Splitscreen
Halo: Reach
- Campaign
- Custom Games
- Firefight
- Forge
- Local Area Networking (LAN)
- Online Squads
- Splitscreen
Halo: Spartan Assault
- Campaign
- Matchmaking
- Online Squads
Halo Wars
- Campaign
- Matchmaking
- Online Squads
It should be noted that the Halo multiplayer server shutdown will even impact those who play the above titles on Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S via backward compatibility. The only versions of these games that’ll be available for online play after January 13 are part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection. All the games that are a part of that anthology will continue to function normally.
Online gaming on consoles really took off during the seventh console generation. For many gamers, their first online matches were on the Xbox 360, many in Halo multiplayer, and it’s hard to believe that those days are over. We expect that more first-party titles will begin to lose online functionality soon as support for the 360 is completely ended.