This is nothing new for them and their fanbase though.
Remember the "tools"?
Remember when the Xbox one x was marketed to have VR capability but they quietly pretended they never made such promises?
It's been a never ending string of "wait for this" and "wait for that" since the Phil Spencer era began.
True. But I guess a (good) takeaway is, the fanatics get a
little less stupid each time. A little bit more of them finally wake up and stop falling for the bullshit.
On the whole tho most of them are slow learners
They already spent a lot of money building the "Xbox Chip" that circumvent the licensing issue with third party games. It just has nothing to do with the Xbox Ally. If they are going to spend money bypassing the rules that means Xbox know it is a waste of time focusing on the emulation route.
The Emulation route is technologically EASIER for Microsoft, but legally not worth the effort. They would be spending money on negotiations and yet with no obvious profit stream at the end of it.
I thought the "Xbox chip" thing was mainly rumor but has that actually been confirmed? It would make offering BC easy from a legal POV but that does incur a decent amount of additional costs on MS's end.
What's the point? Almost every Xbox game is avaliable as a PC release. No need for emulation.
Xbox console owners moving over to these new devices don't want to re-buy these games on PC if they can avoid it. Plus, especially with pre-XBO titles, sometimes the PC versions were demonstrably worst than the console one, either in performance or missing out a lot of content.
I remember the original PC port of Silent Hill 2 being rather bad compared to the PS2 & Xbox versions, for example. Broken graphics in areas and nowhere near the particle fillrate of the PS2 despite being playable on more powerful computers.
How many 360 games do people really care about emulating in 2025? It's easier just to portthe handful that still exist than all this.
It's not about only getting the most popular games; when you start looking at it only from that perspective is how we start losing access and source code to so many games, and end up losing big chunks of gaming history. This stuff should be seen as preservation efforts first & foremost, and in that context every game that was ever made should count.
It's also about having respect for gaming as an artform; preserving access to all games no matter how small or niche, should always be expected.
it's not a question of it's popular or not. if they don't have a fully capable emulator with official ways to play games, then anyone using any of the new PC Xbox hybrid consoles will just install XEMU or Xenia and play games that way.
XEMU already plays 90% of all Xbox games, and Xenia is already catching up to Microsoft's 360 back compat list.
so making a flakey list of select games will be seen as a joke on a system that has esyy access to emulators.
and hey, they could even sell overpriced hardware to sell their backwards compatibility!
Xbox and Xbox 360 discs can not be read by normal DVD/Bluray drives. you have to flash the bios of some select models if you wanna read Xbox discs.
this means they could literally sell an Xbox backwards compatibility disc drive add-on...
You know something? I had a very similar idea for SIE in bringing hardware-based PS1/2/3 BC to PlayStation consoles like PS6. Make a capable enough interface for the disc drive (needs a lot of bandwidth), throw in the necessary processor components to the disc drive, have the drive push the output framebuffer through the PS6 which sends it out to the television or monitor.
May even be possible to just let the drive have a multiplexed connection to both the I/O block and directly to the GPU, the latter for getting the frames from the drive to the connected display. Yes a product like this would be quite niche, but the audience who'd want that type of hardware-based BC (can throw PSP & Vita in there too) would be willing to pay the money for it.
If SIE could just either integrate the hardware components into a cheap ASIC or make different drives for specific groups of systems (PS1 & PS2 since PS2 basically had all the PS1 hardware in its design anyway; PS3 for PS3 games; PSP & Vita for their games) and price them accordingly.
cans for as long as XboxMS Mark Eting deems...
