Microsoft Could Be Licensing Emulators on Xbox In The Future

gameranx.com:

Microsoft seems to be planning something interesting when it comes to video game emulation on their Xbox consoles.

As some fans found that they could no longer install emulators on their Xbox Series X consoles, they received a secondhand reply from Microsoft about the matter.

As originally posted on Twitter and duplicated on Reddit, here is what a Microsoft employee said:

I’ll copy and paste my email from a friend at the Xbox QA team :

“Hi there,

Thanks for getting in touch with us about the recent ban on emulators on the Xbox store front. We appreciate your interest and concerns.

To answer your questions, the primary reason for the ban is related to legal issues with Nintendo. While emulating itself is not illegal, it can be used to play games from consoles that are still under copyright protection without permission, which can create issues with Nintendo and its affiliate.

Additionally, we take security seriously, and some emulators require permissions beyond what is typical for an app. This could create a potential security risk, as these permissions can be exploited by bad actors to gain access to sensitive information. For these reasons, we have made the decision to ban emulators on the Xbox store front.

However, we understand that many users have dev mode enabled to run legal emulation. We don’t seek to remove this ability, as it doesn’t grant access to the retail components of the system and is considered safe. Unlike retail emulators, dev mode is limited to certain functionalities and doesn’t have system read-write functionality.

That said, we are still exploring ways to allow safe and legal emulation on Xbox. We are in talks with legitimate emulator developers to bring their software onto our platform while