One of Xbox’s strongest features has always been the ‘capture system’ that has been integrated with its consoles for several years. At the press of a button, users can capture clips in up to 4K resolution and share them effortlessly across the Xbox Network and beyond. It has been a relatively unchanged mechanic for around a decade – it has only improved over time.
Now, it has been revealed by Xbox that the capture system is about to face a massive change. It was announced that, as of January 2024, ‘any game clips or screenshots uploaded to the Xbox network will be deleted after 90 days.’
A Monumental Difference
To put that into perspective, I have clips stored on my Xbox Network from around seven or eight years ago – they’re GTA V clips, and they’re just wonderful. Beyond that, I have a scattering of clips from a wide variety of games – UFC, Fallout, Wolfenstein, Call of Duty, The Sims… You name it, it’s there.
If Xbox’s new policy had always been a thing, all those clips would have ceased to exist a little more than three months after I’d captured them, eradicating those memories – unless I backed them up, of course. That’s what’s changing – and it has surprised gamers the world over.
That’s one of two ways around it – you can either back them up or set them to automatically upload to a OneDrive account. As of January 2024, any clips and screenshots captured and uploaded to the Xbox Network will be deleted after just 90 days. It could be a storage-saving thing – perhaps there are billions of forgotten files lingering on an Azure server somewhere, who knows?
It hasn’t yet been confirmed what’s going to happen to existing clips and screenshots that fall outside that threshold.
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