Xbox Users Outraged After Microsoft Warns of Mass Deletion Coming Soon
Xbox One and Xbox Series X fans are fuming with Microsoft.
Microsoft has warned Xbox One, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X users of a mass deletion coming in January 2024. Microsoft is naturally great at promoting the latest games coming to Xbox Game Pass, running extensive ad campaigns for its latest Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S game releases, and most recently celebrating it completing the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. When there is bad news to share though, it doesn't activate the same marketing and PR pipeline. To an extent, this is understandable, and is what everyone else does as well, but as a result not many Xbox fans are aware they are about to lose a ton of their content.
Microsoft has begun to alert Xbox owners via direct console message of a new policy that took effect back on October 1. With this new policy in place, both new and existing captures on the Xbox Network will be automatically deleted after 90 days, with the first deletions starting sometime in January 2024. In other words, you will need to back up all your Xbox Live captures as they are about to be wiped from Xbox Live servers.
"Due to a new policy starting on October 1st, 2023, existing and new captures on the Xbox Network will automatically be deleted after 90 days," reads the alert. "The first deletions will start in January 2024."
BACKUP YOUR XBL CAPTURES
by u/ib_mellow in XboxSeriesX
As you would expect, Xbox fans aren't happy about this. Making the matter worse, Microsoft has not communicated why it's doing this, leaving many Xbox fans to assume it's to save money, which is a reasonable assumption.
"Honestly, **** Microsoft for doing this," reads one popular comment to the post above. "You know they are only doing this to save a literal penny or two. And in the process, destroying years and years of important memories for their paying subscribers. With this change, these videos may as well be gone."
"How are they so freaking bad at this," reads another popular comment. "If you just leave them on your Xbox they auto-delete, you have to upload them. Now they're auto-deleting the uploaded ones too? For **** sake, just let us leave them in our Xbox without auto-deleting them."
At the moment of writing this, Xbox has not responded to the backlash this decision has created. We don't expect this to change for a variety of reasons -- especially at the current level of outrage -- however, if it does, we will be sure to update the story accordingly. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment letting us know what you think. Do you agree with the Xbox fans above or is this an overreaction?