Updating the Orange Box?

[Crumps]

I think it would be good to update it, so then more people that don't have good capture cards etc. can still enjoy TF2 on console. Thoughts?

[Felix]

I'm sure if Microsoft removed the charge to update games on the XBox there'd be an Orange Box update for your console.

[KKiONI]

This topic always seems to arise now and again. While things were more optimistic back in 2010, it surely felt like an update was in the pipes. But now it's completely unlikely with all the information pooling since then.

Gabe said in an interview a long while back that the updates on TF2 360 were a mess, which to me implies it is a mess he is not planning on cleaning up. It makes sense when you see the next reasons I will touch upon.

First being the current structure of TF2. It now contains a store in which micro-transactions can occur. Something like that would be hard to bring over to the Xbox as of course Microsoft would want a slate of that cash, which wouldn't work (or seem right for that matter) for stamps or community made items. Valve also likes a lot of control over their games, and with something as diverse as TF2, Microsoft would probably hold Valve by the throat in terms of what they could do feature wise (like linking backpacks or cross-platform play as an example) and all updates would receive a delay due to having to go through Microsoft.

There are also some hardware limitations of the Xbox that will prevent the updates going in smoothly. I've heard some information floating around pertaining to the amount of RAM the Xbox has. There is also the concern about the size of the update. TF2 has not been updated since around the summer of 2009 (on the Xbox) and it's still missing content before that. So there are about 4 or so years of updates to catch up on containing various things such as new items, new maps, bug fixes, new server features, and engine updates/optimizations. TF2 on the PC is currently around 10.6 GB, if optimized to run on one hardware configuration, it could maybe be around 7 or 8 GB (guessing here). The Orange Box in total on the Xbox is 3.7 GB. So it's got a lot of content to add. Unlike on the PC where updates can add, remove, and modify files installed, the 360 version, console based games access files on a disc that can only be read and nothing else. With that said, when an update is applied, you would need to create all these "redirections" which would tell the console "ignore this file on the CD and use this one in the update files instead" or "just ignore this file". I am not a complete expert on this, but I could see this as a tad straining to the CPU (and the RAM too since I would assume you'd need to keep this list of rules running to catch the exceptions as they occur). Engine updates, bug fixes, and feature additions on the Xbox are also typically stored in the system's cache and TF2 has a lot to update in terms of that. I am not too sure about stuff in that area, but I could imagine seeing some complication occur.

Last but not least, you also have to look at this from a business perspective. When planning an update to a scale as large as this, a company needs to ask "Is this update worth it?" Essentially, they need to look at the amount of work that is needed to pull it off versus the amount of profit, hype, and/or userbase this might generate. The game came out in 2007 and is currently running on its last legs on the console. If an update was made (ignoring the technical limitations for a moment), I would doubt it would generate a sufficient gain in hype or players to justify the amount of effort put into creating it in the first place.

The only thing that sounds remotely likely is using Microsoft's recent entry into the F2P market as a gateway to re-release TF2 on the Xbox Live marketplace as a standalone title.

tl;dr: Unlikely. Hardware, structure, and business limitations make it impossible to accomplish such a task.