Xbox boss wants the games industry to embrace ‘legal emulation’

Like any creative medium, video game developers rely on a certain amount of riffing on other people’s ideas. But in order to evolve an existing concept, people need ways to easily access older works. That is something that is more challenging in video games due to the nature of software and hardware compatibility. And Xbox boss Phil Spencer wants the industry to embrace emulation to solve that problem.

“My hope — and I think I have to present it that way as of now — is as an industry we’d work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game,” Spencer wrote in a message to Axios.