Here’s another reminder that we’re getting older: 4J Studios and Mojang have released the final Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition update. The Xbox 360 version was the first console edition to released and it received new updates for over six years.
Title update 73, the final Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition update, came out earlier this week. 4J Studios, the main console developer, announced the update on Twitter. While it has been a long time coming, 4J announced the move in May, it is still bittersweet for the studio and fans. Legacy consoles, including the 360, PS3, PS Vita, and Wii U, all received the expansive “Update Aquatic” earlier this year.
Title update 73 brings with it one final content pack for Minecraft on the Xbox 360. A new The Nightmare Before Christmas pack adds 40 skins to the game, a new texture pack, and new music.
Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition was announced way back in 2011 at Microsoft’s E3 press conference. The game released digitally almost a year later on May 9, 2012 and a year after that physically. Minecraft on Xbox 360 was a smaller game than its PC counterpart, featuring pared back worlds and no mod support. To counterbalance these drawbacks, 4J Studios added four-player splitscreen to the game, and rebuilt crafting to be easier on a controller.
The game went on to sell over 21 million copies on the Xbox 360 alone, making it the second best selling 360 game (behind Kinect Adventures) of all time. Minecraft has sold over 144 million copies across all platforms, with the 360 version accounting for nearly one out of every seven copies.
Minecraft, as a whole, has been out of beta for over seven years after hitting 1.0 in November 2011. The game released a week after Skyrim, but had been available in a pre-release form for several years before the final release. Microsoft purchased Minecraft and original developer Mojang for $2.5 billion in 2014. Mojang and Microsoft had already developed a close relationship thanks to the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft, but the move was unprecedented at the time.
