What is the future of Microsoft’s Xbox consoles? A lot of PlayStation fans are eager to discourse about how the console wars is over, ignoring that Microsoft’s console plans actually got leaked. But now, a new rumor is once again inviting gamers and industry observers to scratch their heads.
Jez Corden of Windows Central has shared a strange tidbit that he’s head from one of his sources. In his words:
“Microsoft is working hard to integrate Xbox and Windows game development more closely into the future. Windows Central understands that traditional Win32 will be the preferred development environment for the next mainline Xbox consoles, with Xbox One/Series X|S “ERA” environment gradually phased out.
Where that leaves our existing library of Xbox ERA games remains to be seen, but it seems emulation is one avenue Microsoft is exploring for backward compatibility and game preservation.
Will that allow those games to run on Windows devices like Kennan and the ROG Ally, or any average gaming PC, though? It’s hard to say, because there are some legal hurdles contractually about exactly what Microsoft is allowed to do with third-party titles in its store.”
Corden passes over the merits of using Win32, but if this rumor is true, it opens up an entirely new can of worms for Microsoft. In fact, there are enough potential setbacks to this idea to question if this rumor is even real.
Corden refers to Win32 as a developer environment. Through the years, each version of Windows has had a different API, and each API comes with new changes and improvements.
Here’s the thing. Win32 dates back to Windows 95, and is certainly not the latest version of that API. Going back to the API that Microsoft has been using since 1995 ties Xbox to the dilemma that Microsoft has had for years with Windows itself.
If the next generation Xbox works on Win32, it would enable compatibility with Windows applications from thirty years ago. But on the flip side, because of Microsoft’s policies, they haven’t been upgrading Win32 to avoid breaking compatibility with legacy programs.
One way of looking at this issue is how Macromedia Flash was exiled from the internet. Today’s internet runs more efficiently and is more capable because Flash was replaced with HTML5. However, that also led to the disappearance of most of the older internet.
Applying this to Xbox, this may be a boon to backwards compatibility, but it could come at the expense of making an Xbox console that runs fast, or can even perform as well as the Xbox Series S now. In fact, Microsoft came up with the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) so that developers would have a more efficient platform than Win32.
And UWPs had their own issues, but we’re pointing this out so you understand that Win32 is not some magical solution that fixes all of Microsoft’s problems with Xbox. Maybe Microsoft has come up with some new technology that brings all of this together, that we don’t know about yet. Of course, Microsoft is going to show their cards when they feel like it, so we’re just going to have to wait when they actually reveal their plans for their next console generation.
