Xbox head Phil Spencer told Axios he wants the games industry to pursue legal emulation as a way to preserve older titles and ensure modern hardware can run them. He argued that emulation, though often illegal, keeps much of video game history accessible when original purchases or rights are unavailable.
Spencer calls for industry-wide approach to legal emulation
In the interview, Spencer said his “hope” is for the industry to develop forms of legal emulation that would allow contemporary consoles to run reasonable selections of older games. He framed this as a guiding principle: that people should be able to buy, own and continue to play games from past generations.
Xbox’s existing backward compatibility work
Spencer noted that Microsoft has already implemented backward compatibility within its own platforms. The Xbox One introduced compatibility for original Xbox and Xbox 360 titles, and that functionality carries over to the Xbox Series X|S family.
To date, Microsoft has made 632 Xbox 360 games compatible with current consoles and 63 titles from the first Xbox. During Xbox’s 20th anniversary, the company announced an additional 76 classic titles as the final batch of newly supported backward-compatible games, citing “licensing, rights and technical limitations” as constraints on further additions.
Scale of older libraries and licensing limits
Spencer highlighted the scale of past console libraries to illustrate the challenge: the Xbox 360 had 2,154 releases over its lifetime, while the original Xbox totaled 997. Those numbers underscore why many games are effectively unavailable through standard commercial channels and often only playable through emulation.
Industry perspective on access and preservation
Spencer said industry stakeholders should aim toward a norm in which “any person should be able to buy any game or own any game and continue to play.” His remarks position legal emulation as a potential solution for preservation and access, while acknowledging the complex legal and technical barriers that currently limit such efforts.
Sources: Axios, Games Industry
