The Xenia team has gone on word to officially deny they are working with Microsoft in any capacity.
As shared on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit by user stoksyxl, the dev teams shared this statement on Discord to disseminate with the public:
Hey everyone, I just wanted to clear some confusion regarding a rumor that has recently surfaced online.
The Xenia (and Xenia Canary, by extension) team is by no means associated with, nor working alongside Microsoft in any capacity. Microsoft uses their own emulation to provide backwards compatibility on Xbox One/Series consoles and as such has no reason to collaborate with Xenia, even if they decided to bring these titles to PC.
Xenia continues to be a community-run effort that encourages and enforces legal emulation practices both in development and within this server.
We first reported on this rumor last week, as eXtas1s claimed that Microsoft had reached out to the Xenia Canary dev team to launch a new Xbox Classics services to bring Xbox and Xbox 360 games to Game Pass. Shortly after, Jez Corden stated that he couldn’t corroborate this rumor, and there was a shorter statement from the Xenia Canary team denying this story.
In response, eXtas1s stated that he read an internal employee newsletter, so he was confident that this rumor is true. He also pointed out that the Xenia Canary team are under NDAs, so they have no choice but to officially deny this rumor. For what its worth, the Xenia Canary dev who gave the initial statement also pointed out that if they were working with Microsoft, they would not be under liberty to talk about it because they would be under NDA.
So, one can take or give this rumor as they wish. We have ourselves pointed out when eXtas1s has shared rumors that turned out to be debunked. But there’s at least some reason to consider that this rumor could be possible. Microsoft has been vaguely talking about plans to bring console and PC together, and that backwards compatibility, as well as forwards compatibility, would be a huge part of Microsoft’s future.
Most recently, we learned that AMD’s partnership with Xbox, would go beyond consoles. They would be making a new line of gaming focused chipsets that will be used in consoles, and also PCs, handhelds, and even cloud devices. It’s not hard to see emulation be a part of that, but Xenia’s claim that Microsoft would use their existing emulation technology also makes sense. Truthfully, even the most optimistic emulation advocate has to admit that Xbox’s in-house emulation efforts are in advance of all of Xenia’s efforts, because they don’t have to reverse engineer the Xbox consoles’ BIOS and other proprietary tech.
