Xbox is moving forward with its plans of unveiling a major ‘technological leap’ in the coming months. The new President of Xbox, Sarah Bond, seems to have dedicated a lot of time and resources towards fulfilling that promise.
Ever since her appointment to the post since Kareem Choudhry’s retirement, she has been quite busy in the company’s attempt at creating the next-generation hardware. With the console market hitting its peak back in 2008, Xbox’s resilience about their console and their strategy of becoming a gaming company has paid dividends as for the first time in the company’s history, they have become a bigger organization than Microsoft.
What Is Xbox Building Towards?
Xbox has been famously associated with several rumors including the company going cross-platform, integrating with Steam, and so on. However, at the latest Xbox Direct, Phil Spencer had squashed the probability of Xbox going cross-platform by maintaining that the Game Pass will remain exclusive to Xbox.
However, there are four titles that are in the works for being released cross-platform. But this in no way ensures that the company will be releasing all games for other consoles. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Starfield, two of the most anticipated games, are still slated to be Xbox exclusives.
The company has been targeting to become a gaming powerhouse for quite a while as they kept acquiring game development companies to work under their banner. But the recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard is a crowning moment. With games like Call of Duty, Diablo, Overwatch, and a lot more under their name, they are bound to be a significant addition to the company.
But, the most important part that Xbox is building towards is backward compatibility for the new consoles. With the shift to digital licensing models and online services, a lot of old games are going permanently offline. Companies like Apple and Google are known for routinely wiping out old games, especially mobile games so that it is like they never existed in the first place. Even Nintendo is known to have wiped off old games to make space for newer ones.
Brand New Team for Game Preservation
One of Microsoft’s most commendable steps is to set up a dedicated team for game preservation against future paradigm shifts in technology. The use of generative AI in video games is shaking up things big time. The vision for Xbox seems clear – Preserve all Xbox games so that future generations can enjoy them too. In an email that Sarah Bond sent to her employees, she says,
We have formed a new team dedicated to game preservation, important to all of us at Xbox and the industry itself. We are building on our strong history of delivering backwards compatibility to our players, and we remain committed to bringing forward the amazing library of Xbox games for future generations of players to enjoy.
Players who were worried about their older titles becoming unplayable on the new consoles can rest easy knowing that Xbox is building backward compatibility for its entire digital library.
More news on this can be expected at the annual Xbox Showcase, slated to take place in July.
What do you think of Xbox’s steps towards the preservation of video games? Are you excited to discover the ‘technological leap’ the company keeps talking about? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
