One thing Phil Spencer does not seem to care about is emulation. There are already Xbox and PlayStation emulators that allow access to more of both platforms back catalogues than any of the current generation consoles are capable of…
Xbox could build cloud based emulators off the open source tools already available and make their entire Xbox back catalogue accessible to current users to stream. They could help improve the tools to ensure greater and greater compatibility for titles and then it would be there forever.
The reason it doesn’t happen is money. They dont see money in game preservation so they dont bother beyond a few big name nostalgia hits. Muse AI isn’t about game preservation, its about game development - they’re just pissing around with game preservation to feed it content as a punt on the future for it somehow making game development cheaper.
I can’t say I buy this fully. From a marketkng standpoint, it seems like a huge win: “Subscribe to game pass ultimate and you get thousands of games old and new, up by thousands from last year”. From a financial standpoint, running those emulators should be a lot less compute heavy than current games so it should be cheaper.
The only real issue I see here is legal. Licensing the rights to distribute the games via streaming for their entire back catalogue can’t be easy.
One thing Phil Spencer does not seem to care about is emulation. There are already Xbox and PlayStation emulators that allow access to more of both platforms back catalogues than any of the current generation consoles are capable of…
Xbox could build cloud based emulators off the open source tools already available and make their entire Xbox back catalogue accessible to current users to stream. They could help improve the tools to ensure greater and greater compatibility for titles and then it would be there forever.
The reason it doesn’t happen is money. They dont see money in game preservation so they dont bother beyond a few big name nostalgia hits. Muse AI isn’t about game preservation, its about game development - they’re just pissing around with game preservation to feed it content as a punt on the future for it somehow making game development cheaper.
I can’t say I buy this fully. From a marketkng standpoint, it seems like a huge win: “Subscribe to game pass ultimate and you get thousands of games old and new, up by thousands from last year”. From a financial standpoint, running those emulators should be a lot less compute heavy than current games so it should be cheaper.
The only real issue I see here is legal. Licensing the rights to distribute the games via streaming for their entire back catalogue can’t be easy.