Xbox 360

Overview

The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft, being the successor to the original Xbox and the second console in the Xbox series. It was officially unveiled in the program titled Xbox: The Next Generation Revealed on May 12, 2005, with detailed launch and game information announced later that month at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). As a seventh-generation console, it primarily competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii.

The Xbox 360's online service, Xbox Live, was expanded from its previous iteration on the original Xbox and received regular updates during the console's lifetime. Available in free and subscription-based varieties, Xbox Live allows users to play games online; download games (through Xbox Live Arcade) and game demos; purchase and stream music, television programs, and films through the Xbox Music and Xbox Video portals; and access third-party content services through media streaming applications. In addition to online multimedia features, it allows users to stream media from local PCs. Several peripherals have been released, including wireless controllers, expanded hard drive storage, and the Kinect motion sensing camera. The release of these additional services and peripherals helped the Xbox brand grow from gaming-only to encompassing all multimedia, turning it into a hub for living-room computing entertainment.

Launched worldwide mostly between November 2005 and December 2006, the Xbox 360 was initially in short supply in many regions, including North America and Europe. The earliest versions of the console suffered from a high failure rate, indicated by the so-called "Red Ring of Death", necessitating an extension of the device's warranty period. Microsoft released two redesigned models of the console: the Xbox 360 S slim model in 2010, and the Xbox 360 E in 2013.

Specifications

Manufacturer

Flextronics, Wistron, Celestica, Foxconn

Developer

Microsoft

Type

Home video game console

Generation

Seventh

Discontinued

April 20, 2016

Units sold

84 million () (details)

Media

DVD, CD, digital distribution; Add-on: HD DVD (discontinued)

Processor

3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon

Graphics

500 MHz ATI/AMD Xenos, 240 GFLOPS

Memory

512 Megabyte, MB of unified GDDR3 RAM clocked at 700 MHz 10 MB of eDRAM cache on Xenos (graphics chip), Xenos GPU

Sound

Analog stereo Stereo LPCM (TOSLINK and HDMI) Dolby Digital 5.1 (TOSLINK and HDMI) Dolby Digital with WMA pro (TOSLINK and HDMI)

Online service

Xbox Live | top_game = Kinect Adventures!, 24 million; (bundled with Kinect); Grand Theft Auto V, 22.95 million (non-Kinect game) (list) | currentfw = 2.0.17559.0

Controllers

4 Big Button Pads may be used in addition to other controllers.

Backward compatibility

Selected Xbox games (requires hard drive and the latest update)

Predecessor

Xbox

Successor

Xbox One

Models

• Xbox 360 Elite
• Xbox 360 Arcade
• Xbox 360 S
• Xbox 360 Original

Model names as listed by IGDB.

Games

1294 Xbox 360 games are written up here, with trophies, patches and what still works online.

See the Xbox 360 games

More from Xbox

• Xbox 2001
• Xbox 360 Elite 2007
• Xbox 360 S 2010
• Xbox 360 E 2013
• Xbox One 2013
• Xbox One S 2016
• Xbox One X 2017
• Xbox Series S 2020
• Xbox Series X 2020
• Xbox Series X and Series S 2020

Sources

• Wikipedia overview and specifications
• IGDB model names
• Xbox 360 Chatpad+controller.png Alphathon CC BY-SA 3.0
• Xbox360-ringofdeath.jpg Droobey at English Wikipedia Public domain
• Xbox-360S-Console-Set.jpg Evan-Amos Public domain

The overview is adapted from Wikipedia and shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

Checked October 2026.