Microsoft is in favor of emulating old games for their preservation

Phil Spencer, Executive Vice President of Gaming at Microsoft (Xbox), wants the industry to sell more old games through emulation. There are major legal hurdles to making widespread emulation in the industry a reality, but it would go a long way toward making older games more accessible to gamers. in addition to ensuring its preservation.

“My hope (and I think I have to present it that way from now on) is that as an industry, we work on a legal emulation that allows modern hardware to run any (within reason) old executable that allows someone to play any game, “Phil Spencer said.

Emulation allows modern consoles to simulate old hardware to run games that ran on those platforms. Currently, Xbox uses this process to run older games on its current consoles. Xbox Series X|S y Xbox One.

Although many are familiar with illegal emulation, the method has long been used by the gaming industry, mostly by Nintendo, things as they are. Even so, the practice among the main titles themselves tied to an intellectual property is not as widespread as Spencer would like.

“Although we remain focused on preserving and improving the art form of games, we have reached the limit of our ability to incorporate new games from the past due to legal, technical and licensing restrictions,” the company has come to reveal on the web Xbox official.

Xbox has recently released 70 emulated games from the Xbox 360 and original Xbox to your backwards compatibility library. Several of these older titles have also improved their resolution and frame rate on newer consoles.

One of the reasons why official emulation is not more widespread is that developers and platforms they do not sell software or game files to support it. Players’ access to older games is dependent on existing a supporting ecosystem and a process to check whether players have the rights to play certain games.

via: Kotaku