If you only ever paid attention to its videogame efforts, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that Microsoft is constantly trading blows with Apple and Nvidia for the position of 'biggest corporation on Earth by market cap'. In our neck of the woods, Microsoft is a perpetual third to Nintendo and Sony in the console wars, and a barely tolerated necessity when it comes to playing games on PC (SteamOS' desktop version can't come fast enough).
Which is a big reason why everyone is wondering just what ol' Phil Spencer has up his sleeve when it comes to the future of Microsoft's hardware business. We know a handheld Xbox is coming, that once-exclusive games keep making their way to PlayStation, and that Microsoft is very keen to get you thinking of every screen in your home as a portal to the big, wide world of Xbox, but what if things get even weirder? What if the next Xbox is a Microsoft take on the Steam Machine—a Windows box with internal emulation magic that lets you play both the Xbox back catalogue and your PC games?
I've got my doubts about all that, but that's where the rumour mill's at these days. In fact, folks have been whispering that Microsoft is working with none other than Xbox 360 emulator Xenia to make its Windows-Xbox dreams a reality. They've been whispering it so loudly that Xenia has now had to come out on Discord to tell everyone that, no, it's not doing anything with Microsoft. Microsoft actually has enough money to make its own emulator if it really wants to.
"The Xenia (and Xenia Canary, by extension) team is by no means associated with, nor working alongside Microsoft in any capacity," said Xenia contributor Jebobs in an announcement. "Microsoft uses their own emulation to provide backwards compatibility on Xbox One/Series consoles and as such has no reason to collaborate with Xenia, even if they decided to bring these titles to PC.
"Xenia continues to be a community-run effort that encourages and enforces legal emulation practices both in development and within this server."
Fellow Xenia dev ZolaKluke hammered the point home in other messages on the server: "What fucking AI ChatGPT stuff have you been reading," they asked in response to someone posting about the rumour Xenia was in cahoots with Microsoft. "If it was real I'd be under an NDA… Plus Microsoft has their own emulator why would they even touch Xenia[?]"
So, um, I'm gonna go ahead and say that the rumor has been pretty conclusively debunked. That's not to say Xbox isn't cooking up something absolutely wild deep in the Microsoft labs, but if it is, it's not doing it with Xenia's help.
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