Phil Spencer calls for industry to work on 'legal emulation' Xbox boss says enabling people to continue playing titles they own "seems like a great North Star" for games companies
James Batchelor Editor-in-Chief Thursday 18th November 2021 Share this article Share
Companies in this article Microsoft Xbox
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer says he wants to see the games industry working harder on finding legal emulation in order to better preserve older games.
His comments come from an interview with Axios, where he discussed the industry's problems when it comes to preserving its past -- something he has expressed concerns about before.
"My hope (and I think I have to present it that way as of now) is as an industry we'd work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game," he told the site.
The interview followed just days after Xbox's 20th anniversary celebrations, during which it announced a wave of 76 back catalogue titles that were being made compatible with Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
However, while Microsoft has made a big deal about enabling four generations worth of titles to be playable on its latest machines, the company also confirmed this would be the final batch of new backwards compatible titles "due to licensing, rights and technical constraints."
This leaves several titles, such as original Xbox games like Jet Set Radio Future, inaccessible unless players track down both the original console and a physical copy of the game.
Spencer observed how different this is to other entertainment mediums, where technology barriers are lower and therefore older content is easier to access.
"I think we can learn from the history of how we got here through creative," he said. "I love it in music. I love it in movies and TV, and there's positive reasons for gaming to want to follow."
Spencer concluded that he was keen to see the industry overcome the aforementioned limitations and again encouraged all companies to seek solutions.
"I think in the end, if we said, 'Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry."
vid_icarus on November 18th, 2021 at 17:51 UTC »
Read as “monetized emulation”
Redisigh on November 18th, 2021 at 16:27 UTC »
I’ve never really cared for emulation until only recently as I’ve really been wanting to play the Ace Combat games other than 6 and 7.
Problem is that I don’t feel like going through the effort of buying an original playstation, a PS2 and a PS3 for them. Some people have suggested messing with my SX’s dev console to emulate the games on it but I have no clue as to how to do that and don’t wanna risk fucking something up
soliloquy1985 on November 18th, 2021 at 16:24 UTC »
For the record, most emulation is legal. The only sketchy bits are emulators that need BIOS images to run. Distributing those could be illegal. Many emulators have alternate files to use now though, so even that isn't really a problem. Emulation being illegal is a false narrative that the game industry has been pushing for decades to try and scare people away from it. Despite offering up few (or no) solutions for people who want to play older games, they still go after emulation because they assume it'll harm their bottom lines despite readily available data pointing to the contrary.
The real problem is purchasing older games vs. downloading ROMs/ISOs. Buying the games in their original media can be prohibitively expensive and it's virtually impossible to transfer them onto a PC yourself without specialized hardware. What modern storefronts exist for older games are also often subpar experiences. Take Nintendo's subscription service for example. You're essentially only renting the games and it's plagued with issues. It's not the experience many want. Downloading ROMs, however, is easy and just works.
What the industry needs to do is support emulator devs, license their software, then find creative ways to offer up their older software libraries for sale again. They need to realize that gamers, uh, find a way. If they don't provide a legal (and reasonable) option, that's on them.