During his time heading Xbox, Phil Spencer has led the games company to create a whole variety of consumer friendly products and services, including Xbox Game Pass, Cloud streaming systems, and even the Adaptive Controller. But while all of this is pretty great, Spencer is now also voicing his opinion on the state of game emulation and how he believes it should be treated differently.
Speaking to Axios, the Xbox head honcho has mentioned that he thinks the industry has a severe problem with preserving older games, and believes that emulation could be a solution to this problem.
"I think we can learn from the history of how we got here through the creative," said Spencer. "I love it in music. I love it in movies and TV, and there's positive reasons for gaming to want to follow."
"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 signed off on the matter by also stating, "I think in the end, if we said, 'Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry."
Microsoft and Xbox has also been known for championing backwards compatibility, a service that takes original Xbox and Xbox 360 games and makes them playable on the more recent Xbox consoles. At the recent Xbox 20th Anniversary stream, Xbox announced another batch of back compatible games before also noting that they would mark the final round of games to receive the treatment.