Xbox game clip removal - TrueAchievements needs your help

We are introducing a backup system for game clips added to achievement guides and walkthroughs on TrueAchievements in order to preserve them for you.

Rich Stone

Published 06 Nov 2023

As you may recall, Xbox announced the following change to their game capture retention policy in September: Game clips and screenshots may now be automatically deleted from the Xbox network servers 90 days after they are captured.

We were, of course, the first website to integrate Xbox Game Captures way back in January 2015, and made it easy for you to add the clips and screenshots you'd recorded on your Xbox directly into achievement guides and game walkthroughs.

With the above change in policy, these thousands of guides and walkthroughs will suddenly have a big hole in them where the video once sat, rendering them far less useful, and in some cases, completely useless.

We know how useful it is to have such an easy way to include captured console footage in your guides, so we wanted to see if we could come up with a solution to keep this functionality working for you.

Introducing our Xbox Game Clip -> YouTube backup system

In order to keep your guides working as intended and preserve the video content, we've been working on a Game Clip to YouTube backup system.

If you embed one of your Xbox Game Clips into an achievement guide or walkthrough, and we have your permission, we will queue your game clip to be backed up to our new TrueAchievements User Guides YouTube channel. Once your clip has been backed up, we will dynamically replace the embedded Xbox Game Clip with the embedded YouTube panel instead. This means that the guide will continue to work when the Xbox Clip has been deleted.

Here's an example of a swapped out video: Solution for Toxic Veins In SMITE

Some important things to note:

The clips are not going to be monetized on YouTube

This new backup system is purely for us to retain the functionality of our achievement guides. We will not be monetizing the videos on YouTube.

There is a new permission we are asking for in order to back-up your Xbox Clips

We are asking for your permission in order to back up the clips you have posted in your solutions. You can give us that permission now by clicking the link below:

Set my Xbox Clip backup permission

We will only back up the clips you add to achievement guides or walkthroughs

We will not be backing up any of your clips except those that you add to your guides or walkthroughs on TrueAchievements.

We have already started this back up process for clips in achievement guides

Because the new Xbox retention policy is already in place, we have started backing up some guide clips to YouTube already. There's a hard limit to the number of videos we can upload each day so we manually started this process 2 weeks ago in order to preserve as much as we could.

If you do not give us your permission to back your clips up, we will delete these videos from YouTube, and the solutions will have a hole in them where the video previously lived.

When saving a guide which contains one of your clips, we will ask for your permission

If you have not given us your permission to back up your Xbox clips, we will ask for it when you embed a clip into a guide. You will not be able to save the guide until you give us your permission. This is to prevent the guide losing it's video component after 90 days.

Deletion of achievement guides

If you delete your achievement guide, we will delete any clips associated with that guide from our YouTube channel.

Thank you for your help with this project, we hope it will keep it as easy as possible for you to create guides and walkthroughs on TrueAchievements.

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Written by Rich Stone

Yo! Rich here - I was the one that created TrueAchievements back in 2008 as I felt the Xbox Gamerscore system could be improved. The site has evolved massively since then and it's now the biggest and best Xbox community on the planet! Racing games and open world shooters are my thing, but I'll give most genres a go. Except RPGs - those things are evil.