Xbox Live To Close Service for Original Xbox Games on April 15th

In a letter posted to the Xbox 360 Gamerscore news blog this morning, Xbox Live General Manager Marc Whitten announced that Live would be ending its service for original Xbox games starting April 15.

The termination applies to all Xbox Original titles, despite their being fully playable on the 360 (like Halo 2 or Jade Empire). The decision, Whitten says, comes from the need to evolve Xbox Live into a service with new features that will “harness the full power of Xbox 360.” Sadly, many of these planned changes will make Live incompatible with old Xbox games.

We will contact the Xbox LIVE members directly impacted by this change and if this includes you, I encourage you to check your LIVE messages and associated e-mail account over the coming weeks for more details and opportunities. We view you as a partner in this process.

We’ll share more details soon, but in the meantime I want to assure you that the best is yet to come for Xbox LIVE. I believe we’ll look back on 2010 as a landmark year in gaming and home entertainment, and I couldn’t be more excited about what we have in store with “Project Natal” and LIVE. The LIVE community is the driving force behind everything we do, and it’s because of the community that ground-breaking experiences on Xbox continue to be possible.

Read the full letter for yourself here.