Head of Xbox Phil Spencer sat down with Kinda Funny Games to discuss a number of things, with topics ranging from legacy titles on Xbox Game Pass to the PS5 DualSense controller, and how he is worried about gaming losing its history. Check out the video below.
Phil Spencer shares his concerns on the matter and implores others in the industry to come forward to preserve the legacy of the medium. Xbox Series X/S can natively run many of Xbox One, Xbox 360, and original Xbox’s titles, while Nintendo and Sony have relatively inferior implementations on that front.
“I do worry a little bit about losing our artform and the history of it,” Phil Spencer said (as transcribed by VGC). “When I think about old ROMs and MAME and these things of where these old games are going to go as the hardware that’s capable of running those games… I really wish as an industry we’d come together to help preserve the history of what gaming is about, so we don’t lose the ability to go back.”
Phil Spencer also proposes cloud gaming as a viable front for emulating these older games, since consumer-grade hardware might not have such horsepower.
“On preservation, one of the things that the cloud does offer us is the ability to throw more hardware at some of the emulation scenarios, to make it possible to really emulate… when the team figured out how to emulate Power PC instruction sets on a X86 set, which was how we went from 360 to Xbox One back-compat, we were kind of lucky that the Xbox One had enough processing power to pull off that emulation.”
Of course, its not possible to emulate every game, since many require specialized hardware such as the Kinect. On the other hand, Sony doesn’t seem to be on the same page, particularly with its decision to close the PSP digital storefront even after fan-backlash.