Xbox 360 users get free cloud saves when they upgrade to Xbox Series X|S

Your 300 hour Skyrim save and my Grabbed by the Ghoulies save are ready to transfer.

A new generation is all about the new, right? No, and shame on you. One feature Microsoft is leaning on especially hard this coming generation is backwards compatibility, building on the progress they made with the Xbox One.

The idea is that you can upgrade to the Xbox Series X or S and see your old games with “enhancements and new features” whilst carrying on from where you left off. It’s a very ‘upgrade your PC’ approach to console generations.

Perhaps surprisingly, Microsoft stipulates in its latest post on backwards compatibility that 360 users are not being forgotten in this mission:

“For those of you still enjoying Xbox 360, cloud saves will soon be free to all Xbox 360 users, making transferring your favourite games to Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S even easier.”

Whilst it’s amusing to imagine stubborn Xbox 360 users resisting this past generation for the past seven years, there’s certainly still an audience there. According to Statista, “in 2019, the installed base of Microsoft Xbox 360 was estimated to remain at 100.6 million units.”

There’s also the users like myself who skipped the Xbox One in favour of the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch this generation. Can these users be enticed back in with their old 360 saves preserved for a new generation?

As for Xbox One users, they too don’t need an active Xbox Live Gold subscription to access cloud saves and will see their saves carried over. Also, if you already have your games installed on an external drive, you can simply connect that up to a new console.

This is excellent news for those of you with an old Skyrim save you want to revisit. Me? I might well see how my Viva Pinata garden is doing.

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