There’s a really interesting new rumor, that could upend not only the console business, but the entire conversation about emulation.
As shared on ResetERA by user P40L0, eXtas1s dropped a bunch of rumors about Microsoft’s plans to actually blur the lines between PC gaming and Xbox. We’re focusing on the one that would turn all PC gamers into Xbox gamers overnight.
According to eXtas1s, Microsoft is working on an Xbox emulator for Windows. This is an x64 emulator that will allow you to play Xbox games on PC by emulating the Xbox. Just to understand, this will be a completely different setup from what Xbox gamers currently have between PC and Xbox consoles.
As an Xbox user, you have a library of games that can be played on Xbox and on PC. Some of these games are available on one platform only. But when games are available on both, the PC version is a completely native port built from the ground up for that platform.
If this Xbox emulator is real, it will allow Xbox users to take the Xbox version of the game and play it using the emulator on PC. This would be a cheap and efficient way to make a lot of Xbox games compatible on PC. But, it can potentially open a can of worms, as new incompatibilities can emerge that they will then have to do new and unique programming for. Depending on how good the emulator is, it can swing between being great or awful for gamers.
This Xbox emulator’s existence may also not necessarily mean that Microsoft will stop making native PC ports of their games. But it certainly adds new options for their consumers.
If eXtas1s’ information is correct, Steam and Xbox versions of games will continue to be incompatible. That means saves and achievements will remain separate between them.
Now, if you were wondering if there were any limits to this emulator, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The emulator will play games even if they weren’t added to the Xbox backwards compatibility program.
We have reason to doubt eXtas1s rumors, even if he still gets some information correct. In this case, this all lines up with Xbox head Sarah Bond’s announcement last year that they launched a game preservation and forward preservation program.
It also puts the emulator community in an odd position. If you’ve muddled in video game emulators for years, you’ll know that progress on emulators for both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360 has remained slow and unsatisfactory for gamers. Microsoft’s backwards compatibility helped bring a lot of games from those platforms back to the forefront, but of course they weren’t able to relicense every single game.
This rumor does raise some interesting questions, such as about DLC and reverting between game versions. But that won’t be worth considering if this rumor doesn’t turn out to be true after all. So we’ll have to wait and see how much this turns out to be true. If Microsoft does push the Overton Window in this direction, Sony and even Nintendo may eventually feel compelled to create their own PC emulator backwards compatibility programs in the future.
