Skip to main content

Microsoft: ‘Nearly 1 million’ unused Xbox Gamertags now up for grabs

microsoft to release nearly 1 million xbox gamertags 2 640x0
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Microsoft announced plans to wipe “nearly 1 million” unused and dormant Xbox Gamertags this week, giving gamers a rare opportunity to reclaim abandoned Xbox Live usernames.

“Many of the best and most desirable Gamertags were unavailable … until now,” Xbox Wire editor-in-chief Will Tuttle explained. “We’ve listened to your feedback and once again Team Xbox is excited to announce the release of a large number of previously unavailable Gamertags!”

Recommended Videos

Microsoft’s Gamertag release process will begin on May 18, and will continue through the rest of the month.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

All of this month’s newly available Gamertags were initially registered when Xbox Live launched in 2002. Microsoft assures that the upcoming mass-deletion will only affect users who never transferred their Xbox Live account to an Xbox 360 or Xbox One console over the last decade.

“These Gamertags are from the original Xbox era, the same source of Gamertags we used in our 2011 release,” Tuttle wrote. “These accounts never migrated to Xbox 360 and as a result they have been inactive for quite some time.”

Squatters claimed many sought-after Xbox Live usernames during the service’s formative years, and Microsoft’s impending cleanup will make many of them available for registration for the first time in over a decade.

While Microsoft did not give specific examples of Xbox Live Gamertags that will be available for re-registration this month, the publisher notes that players will soon be able to claim many usernames that feature “proper names, pop culture references, types of food, geography, and travel, science and technology, math and numbers, animals, and some of the greatest inventions of all time.”

Microsoft notes that this month’s newly released Gamertags will be up for grabs for “Xbox Live Gold customers with active subscriptions and at least one year of cumulative Xbox Live Gold tenure.” Xbox Live users are given one chance to rename their Gamertag for free, and all future changes require a $10 fee.

Danny Cowan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Danny’s passion for video games was ignited upon his first encounter with Nintendo’s Duck Hunt, and years later, he still…
For Microsoft, indies aren’t Game Pass extras. They’re the future of Xbox
A list of indie games on Xbox appears in a grid.

Xbox may be about as corporate a brand as you can find, but it’s been a surprisingly vital platform for independent developers. That dates back to the Xbox Live Arcade days of old, when small developers were given a place to easily publish their projects on consoles. Rather than pulling away from those days, Xbox has only doubled down on its relationship to indies in the years since through initiatives like ID@Xbox and a Developer Acceleration Program designed to help underrepresented developers get their games out.

Over the past few months, the brand has been on a global tour to reach small developers directly and court them to Xbox. That effort would take the company to New York City on November 18, where Xbox leadership would speak to local developers and students about how to submit to their programs (the event would also feature a questionably timed speech from New York City Mayor Eric Adams amid an FBI investigation into his campaign funds). It’s clear that Microsoft is investing a lot of time and money into signing deals with small developers, but why make the effort when it could comfortably thrive just by publishing major titles through acquired publishers like Activision Blizzard and Bethesda?

Read more
Rebuild your own nostalgia with this detailed Xbox 360 toy set
xbox 360 mega building set replica

Although Microsoft is shutting down the Xbox 360 Store next year and definitely wants you to pick up its newest console for Starfield, it has still found a new way to appeal to the nostalgia of Xbox 360 players. It's doing so through the new Mega Showcase Microsoft Xbox 360 Collector Building Set, which will be available this October.

This set will be available starting on October 8 and will cost you $150 dollars; that said, you'll only be able to pick one up at Target. Mega makes Lego-like replica models of things for people to build, and this one is intricately designed to look like the launch version of Xbox 360. It's at 3:4 scale and made up of 1342 pieces. With it, players can build a version of the Xbox 360, a controller, and a case and disc for Halo 3. Even the packaging it comes in looks like the boxes Xbox 360 consoles came in at release. 
Once built, this model will actually have working lights and a disc drive, as well as a hard drive and side shell panels that are removable. It obviously won't be able to play actual Xbox 360 games, but it still looks like a faithful recreation of Microsoft's classic game console. This is far from the first time we've seen video games and their consoles branch over into the work of buildable toys, as Nintendo patterned with Lego to create various Mario sets as well as a replica NES.
The Mega Showcase Microsoft Xbox 360 Collector Building Set releases exclusively at Target on October 8.

Read more
The impending Xbox 360 Store closure makes me wary of Game Pass’ future
The Xbox logo.

I'm an avid Xbox Game Pass user, often trying almost every game that comes to the service and closely following the games coming to and leaving the service each month. Following some recent announcements by Microsoft, though, I've been thinking a lot more about something else about Xbox Game Pass and Microsoft's current digital-focused Xbox storefronts and ecosystem: what happens when it all goes away?
Microsoft announced last week that it will shut down the Xbox 360 Store in July 2024. After that day, it will be impossible to buy games, movies, or TV shows digitally on the Xbox 360 store; it's just like what happened with the 3DS and Wii U eShops earlier this year. That announcement also came not long after Microsoft revealed it would replace Xbox Live Gold with Xbox Game Pass Core in September. With these changes, Microsoft is stamping out any support or focus its giving to the Xbox 360's era as a platform. As someone who grew up mostly playing Xbox 360, seeing these things I grew up with go away is saddening. It's also making me think about the day this will eventually happen to Xbox Game Pass or the store on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

Frankly, I'm not as concerned that Microsoft is going to do it anytime soon. Microsoft has given no indication that it plans on abandoning Xbox Game Pass. It's a really successful subscription service heavily integrated into all of its current platforms, there are titles confirmed to launch day one on it into 2024 and beyond, and Xbox initiatives like Play Anywhere and Smart Delivery ensure that at least some version of most Xbox games are available on other platforms. While I expect it to be the primary part of Microsoft's gaming strategy over the next decade, as someone who mainly played Xbox 360 growing up and is now seeing its storefront and subscription service go away, I'm now thinking about what the end of the Game Pass era will look like.
These recent actions have indicated that Microsoft will eventually be willing to do the same to the storefronts and subscription service we're currently using. Even after the backlash PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all faced from these announcements, Sony is the only one that has backtracked its plans to close down older digital storefronts, at least temporarily. Xbox Game Pass is the current hotness for Microsoft, but what happens come the day it isn't? A lot more games are digital-only or tied to a subscription this generation, and those are the games most at risk of being lost if a digital storefront shuts down.
What happens to the Xbox console versions of games like Pentiment or Immortality on Xbox once Xbox Game Pass and the current iteration of the Xbox Store are shuttered? Yes, they can be played on PC, but the Xbox console version will be lost forever. And right now, it doesn't seem like Microsoft has any publicly shared plans to permanently preserve those experiences, nor has it done so for all of the Xbox 360 digital games going away. Game preservation is a significant problem facing the game industry, and Microsoft has just made a move showing that it's on the wrong side of that effort. 

Read more