When the Xbox 360 store got taken offline back in the summer, various users began sharing the "totally gutted" dashboard which looked extremely bare without any kind of Xbox Live branding or game advertisements to speak of.
This topic has returned to the forefront over the past couple of days because a so-called "new" dashboard that looks even more empty. As you can see in the image below, it contains just three tiles - one of which is just a QR code.
The discovery of this dashboard has prompted a lot of sad replies in the comments about how it's been "destroyed" and "massacred" - there's been an awful lot of depressing takes about the state of the Xbox 360 in late 2024! Here are a few:
However, as mentioned in the headline, it's not as bad as it seems. Dig a little deeper, and you'll discover that this version of the dashboard is not the default for most people - you have to access it by using the "Other" locale setting.
It seems that this version of the dash has been implemented for regions where Xbox Live isn't supported, and therefore it's totally stripped back - with just the bare minimum UI features included. There's obviously a chance this could happen in every region at some point down the line, but there are no signs of that happening in the immediate future.
Anyway, we just thought this was interesting - kinda sad, but nothing to get too worked up about (for now, at least!).