The Xbox community should prepare for May 30, as the company is removing a major feature from its devices. Xbox players have experienced several major changes across their platform over the past year, from Microsoft overhauling its rewards scheme to become Rewards with Xbox, to the company’s transformation of Xbox Live Gold into Xbox Game Pass Core as part of a tiered Game Pass system.
As saved and shared to Reddit by volcaandsora, Xbox sent out a notification to all its users warning them to back up their game captures into Microsoft’s cloud storage, OneDrive, or onto an external hard drive before May 30, 2024 as game captures will be deleted after 90 days following this date.
This isn’t the first time this deletion plan has been promised, as Xbox confirmed in October 2023 that game captures that have been stored on the Xbox Network for 90 days or longer will eventually be deleted.
Fortunately, it is only the screenshots and videos being stored on the Xbox Network (which is the default storage for game captures) that are impacted by this change. There are also ways for players to bypass these default settings to ensure captures are being saved to OneDrive or an external hard drive after backing up their pre-existing captures to avoid the risk of deletion in the future.
These steps are as follows:
For those choosing to save to the OneDrive cloud storage, it’s worth noting this only has a 5GB limit for free Microsoft 365 users. There are different tiered Microsoft 365 subscriptions, however, for those who are willing to pay a monthly or yearly fee.
The OneDrive-specific contents of these different tiers are as follows:
The choice to remove unlimited capture storage on the Xbox Network is disappointing, especially as many players would have amassed large libraries of memories over years of playing on the platform, and it definitely seems like a way to push these players toward a paid OneDrive subscription. Fortunately, as the Xbox consoles are also compatible with most external hard drives, this seems like a more affordable way to go, with even larger storage spaces available, and players can even use them as additional storage for games themselves.
Source: volcaandsora/Reddit, Microsoft 365
