Recently, Microsoft officially announced that they will close the ‘Microsoft Internet Games’ service for Windows XP, Windows ME, and Windows 7 systems. At that time, players will not be able to continue to play Windows built-in games that need to be networked on the PCs of these three systems.
Microsoft confirmed that the built-in Internet Games services for Windows XP and ME will end on July 31, 2019. The built-in Internet Games service for Windows 7 will be closed later and will stop service on January 22, 2020. Although it takes about 6 months to shut down the Windows 7 system’s Internet Games service, unfortunately, Microsoft has not added built-in games to the Windows 10 system. So players may really want to say goodbye to these classic games. In addition to games that require networking, other stand-alone games will not be affected.
‘It is with heavy hearts that we have made the difficult decision,’ the Windows gaming team said this month. ‘However, the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources towards more recent technologies.’
In fact, Microsoft has been busy with developing and launching its xCloud Xbox streaming service. The latter will be available in October. The service will let users play on devices like phones and tablets. Also, it will work with all 3,500 games in the Xbox One library as well as the 1,900 titles still in development.
‘Project xCloud is us putting Xboxes in our data centers and allowing people to access those,’ Xbox chief Phil Spencer said during E3 last month. ‘We scratched our heads and said ‘wait a minute, we have tens of millions of people who already have an Xbox One at home, what if they could turn their local Xbox into their own version of xCloud, so they can stream out of their home?’
List of games that have stopped serving:
- Backgammon (XP/ME, 7)
- Checkers (XP/ME, 7)
- Spades (XP/ME, 7)
- Hearts (XP/ME)
- Reversi (XP/ME)
- MSN Go (7)