It looks like Microsoft is not giving up its old catalog of games anytime soon. The gaming giant has recently filed a patent that is set to improve the performance of games running through the cloud. The said patent is supposed to decrease the demand for remakes and remasters while easing the performance of aging titles on newer hardware.
The patent is cloud-based technology that is said to interact with the game in real time, providing special enhancements that will be deployed as you play. This is said to improve the overall performance of gaming games which have a history of running poorly on newer machines. Often it has been up to gamers themselves to provide fixes or patches to older games to get them running on newer hardware.
Microsoft has had a considerably strong history when it comes to game preservation over the years, offering backward compatibility (with certain limitations, however) on the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X either physically or digitally. This has been forefronted by the Games With Gold subscription which has created an income stream for Microsoft to make older games backward compatible digitally at an affordable rate.
The same couldn’t be said for Microsoft’s competitors. Nintendo has been infamous for shutting down absolute digital services, content, and storefronts. This year the Japanese gaming company announced that it would begin the gradual closure of WiiU and 3DS stores, with the storefronts ultimately closing on March 27, 2023. Sony has similarly closed PS Vita and PS3 storefronts, but shortly after have backtracked their decisions.
But when it has come to IPs Nintendo has done well to keep true to its old-school brand offering giving players access to a catalog of older games (Like Games with Gold) through its Nintendo Switch Online program. Similarly, Sony has provided digital backward compatibility to PS4 games on the PS5 through Sony’s online service. But that’s where the support starts and ends.
Xbox’s lifespan, however, is far shorter than that of Sony’s or Nintendo’s. The first console was Launched in late 2001 in North America, coming to a generation after Sony’s first debut of the PlayStation and around a decade and a half behind Nintendo’s first arrival. It would then make sense that Microsoft aims to keep the Xbox gaming catalog as populated as possible as it hasn’t been in the console picture for as long as its competitors.
In other Microsoft news, we may see a new cheaper Xbox Live Pass which would delay first-party Xbox titles by six months and would integrate adverts before playing the game.
