As rights issues ban more background Xbox games, Phil Spencer calls for ‘legal emulation’

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The head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, wants to see the games industry work toward a legal solution to emulating games, in order to better preserve legacy software, he said.

Saving has become an increasingly important topic in the gaming industry in recent years, as older games are gradually becoming unavailable due to outdated hardware or closed online services.

Speaking to Axios, Xbox exec Spencer called for software emulation as a solution to preserving the game.

Emulators, which allow modern devices to emulate older devices and play games, are widely used by fans and wallets, but there is currently no global support for them across the industry.

Xbox Series X | S will play old Xbox games using its own emulators. However, since there is no accepted standard in the industry, it still has to secure the rights from the game makers for each title, rather than running games directly from old discs.

And this week, the company claimed that 76 new games added to its backward compatibility library will be the last, due to those legal and technical limitations. The industry standard emulator is supposed to solve such problems.

“I think we can learn from the history of how we got here through creativity,” Spencer said. “I love it in music. I love it in movies and TV, and there are positive reasons why you should follow games.

“My hope (and I think I should present it this way so far) is that as an industry we will be working on a legal simulation that will allow modern hardware to run any (reasonably) older executable allowing anyone to play any game.”

He added, “I think in the end, if we say, ‘Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and keep playing,’ that sounds like a great North Star to us as an industry.”

Compared to its competitors Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft has historically championed the importance of preserving its consoles.

Backwards compatibility has long been a key feature of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S marketing efforts, as the company boosts consoles’ ability to play a wide range of original Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One games

Many games take advantage of the new controllers’ capabilities to “look and play better” than they did originally, and some support features like FPS Boost, which roughly doubles the original frame rate, and Auto HDR, which adds HDR improvements to games shipped with Standard dynamic range.

And earlier this year, Microsoft brought backward-compatible titles to Xbox cloud games for the first time by making a number of classic games from Rare, Bethesda, and more available to mobile users with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription.

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