With the Xbox Series X | S, Microsoft offers access to the catalog of previous generations. This means that many Xbox Original or 360 titles will be playable on the company’s newest consoles and will allow owners of those games to restart them. Today, Xbox boss Phil Spencer urges the entire industry to consider emulation as a means of protecting video games.
Build a large public library
Access to titles that are ten years old or older is not an industry standard. Technological evolution, generations of consoles have always produced a form of obsolescence of our games since the emergence of the medium. Today, to enjoy a work published on Super Nintendo, there is no other legal choice than retrogaming. In other words, you have a copy of the time and you can play it back in your living room.
It is imperative for Phil Spencer to work to save these works today. The emblematic Xbox boss wants to create a large public library that offers access to productions from all eras.
I love it in music. And I like it in movies and on TV, and there are good reasons for the game to follow that pattern.
And Phil Spencer is right. In addition to the indirect regulation of a market that flies away in retro gaming, there are other motivations. So it can be about preserving a legacy in order to enable the discovery of an epoch or its teaching. Or quite simply, to ensure that consumers are entitled to use them.
In the end I think what to say “Everyone should be able to buy any game or own a game and keep playing”, must be a major direction for us as an industry.
Use emulation
If Microsoft has already embraced this thing, Phil Spencer urges the rest of the industry to join him. Building a public video gamer legacy is not without its obstacles, especially legal ones, and the man therefore wants to bring all the gamers together to find solutions. Licenses are therefore a central element of the topic and today prevent emulation in many cases.
My hope – and I think I have to put it this way now – is that we as an industry will work on legal emulation that will allow modern hardware to run (within reasonable limits) any program that is older and allows anyone to do so to play every game
A hope that we of course share. At a time when cloud gaming gives us instant access to modern games, emulating old games could be an ideal addition. And at the same time the guarantee of seeing and playing some of the greatest games in history live.
