Phil Spencer Bears Concern For Game Preservation Regarding The Future Of The Industry

While the divide is close to paper thin in what differentiates the hardware and its capabilities between Xbox Series X|S to PlayStation 5, it’s what both Sony and Microsoft offers exclusively to its platform that drive incentive for its consumers. For PlayStation, of course, it’s the number of first-party releases that arrive annually to its hardware as witnessed for the PlayStation 4 and to continue onward.

But for Xbox, that is still being worked on. However, drive for the Xbox Series consoles is the features it comes with that bears consumer-friendly initiatives. Such as xCloud via Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, FPS Boost, and Smart Delivery. While some are certainly not original to Microsoft, they do show to leave the greatest impact in contrast to other competition. The name stake for Microsoft does happen to be its backwards compatibility for the time being.

Offering now four generations of Xbox on one model(s), Xbox Series S & Xbox Series X can relive old favorites alongside the new additions that will come in due time. But, platform lead Phil Spencer does worry about other platforms and how it deals with game preservation, he explained on the Kinda Funny Gamescast recently.

I do worry a little bit about losing our artform and the history of it. When I think about old ROMs and MAME and these things of where these old games are going to go as the hardware that’s capable of running those games… I really wish as an industry we’d come together to help preserve the history of what gaming is about, so we don’t lose the ability to go back.

I think about what The Paley Center did for TV: Paley early on saw that the television industry was getting ready to throw away literally the tapes that these old TV shows were on and he said, ‘hey, I want to archive those’. Because at some point, somebody will want to go back and watch The Ed Sullivan Show or something and those things shouldn’t be thrown away.

As an industry, I would love it if we came together to help preserve the history of what our industry is about so we don’t lose access to some of the things that got us to where we are today and built this industry. That would be a cool thing.

However, Microsoft does not cover all of its ground. In that, the Kinect is still a niché that is likely to remain behind with the Xbox One generation. Previously, it was confirmed supported games would exclude Kinect titles on Xbox Series X|S. Now, Spencer explains it’s still too far to grasp for emulation. “Kinect is hard just because we don’t support the device. That’s one of the things about games, when you get to real bespoke hardware, I go back to Steel Battalion or something.”

Noted, that is not to say Microsoft has approached other avenues for its backwards compatibility feature. In fact, the firm previously welcomed the feature to be in beta for xCloud. So now, users can experience some Xbox 360 alongside Original Xbox titles via Android alongside now iOS and PC unlike anything before it.

Despite that, however, the overall feature could be only a timed novelty according to one report. From Modern Vintage Gamer and corroborated by SomeOrdinaryGamers on YouTube, the two critique the Xbox DRM for video game licenses and conclude that the feature could be obsolete, “ewaste”, when the respected storefronts for each platforms closes down inevitably. But, there is window to resolve the issue at hand before then, the two added then.

On preservation, one of the things that the cloud does offer us is the ability to throw more hardware at some of the emulation scenarios, to make it possible to really emulate… when the team figured out how to emulate Power PC instruction sets on a X86 set, which was how we went from 360 to Xbox One back-compat, we were kind of lucky that the Xbox One had enough processing power to pull off that emulation.

When we’re in the cloud, we don’t have to worry about the local compute capability to emulate those old systems. Most of those old systems are pretty low spec, so it’s not a huge issue, but I do like that we’re able to elevate it beyond just the device that somebody has in their home.

It’s one of the [reasons] why we look at the cloud and we continue on some of our backward compatibility work, which we are still working on, because I want those games to still be playable. And not just from an Xbox standpoint: take Psychonauts… I want somebody to be able to play that regardless of what controller they want to use or what platform they bought it on.

While speaking to Kinda Funny later on, Phil Spencer also expanded on Microsoft’s potential pursuit to evolve the Xbox Series X|S controller. He tells that the firm does acknowledge the things that Sony did with the DualSense and injects that “there are things that we should go do” in regards to bettering the player’s experience with the gamepad.

Elsewhere, Spencer does go on to reaffirm Microsoft’s disinterest in virtual reality. While he does not criticize the platform directly, he supports his argument by telling the Oculus is where the platform should lead in the industry, not Xbox. You can read the full report by heading here.

Are you in support of Phil Spencer’s statement on game preservations?