Comment on Xbox as a platform is officially dead
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
The PC cannot currently play non-ported Xbox games at this time, though. I get why you’re saying “just a PC” but that’s a distinction worth noting. I hope the PC platform in general will gain the ability to play all Xbox games and not just Xbox branded hardware. I also hope PCs gain the ability to use some of the features that are nice about Xbox (mainly Quick Resume).
No matter how you slice it, it’s going to be emulation. And people will and already can emulate without Microsoft’s “experience”. I doubt it will even have an optical drive!
In fact I’d argue there is no reason to wait for their hardware. Buy or build something now. You can play all the same games. Get an emulator and do the same …
Their emulation work is one of the few bright spots of the Xbox platform on the past decade. Things like FPS boost and Auto HDR are nice for improving older games. I’m not sure if any third party emulators can do the same, admittedly.
Third party emulation teams trying to keep older games alive are true heroes, but there is absolutely something to be said for the quality of a competent team of first-party engineers who have access to all of the original code and architecture documentation. Truly some magic they were able to pull off.
zikzak025@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Could be that they add that functionality into Windows, though. There’s nothing special about newer games that run on Xbox, they’re all x86 applications. Microsoft could just release the Xbox middleware as its own app and allow Xbox games to work on whatever PC it’s installed on, which is basically all that an Xbox is right now.
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Yeah, I’m hoping they don’t wall that stuff off from the general PC space for business reasons.