Game preservation has been a significant issue in the video game industry for decades, especially aggravated with the rise of the “games as a service” model. Now, Xbox has formed a new team specifically dedicated to tackling the issue and ensuring backward compatibility, as announced by its president.
Xbox president Sarah Bond revealed the company’s plans in emails sent out to staff, first reported by Windows Central on April 6. The executive said Xbox is focused on preserving its titles and making them “accessible long into the future.”
“We have formed a new team dedicated to game preservation, important to all of us at Xbox and the industry itself,” Bond said. She added that Microsoft continues to build on their previous practices of backwards compatibility, which brought hundreds of titles from the Xbox 360 to Xbox One and, later, the Series X. “We remain committed to bringing forward the amazing library of Xbox games for future generations of players to enjoy,” she claimed.
The establishment of such a dedicated task force may be great news for gamers concerned with the prevalent issue of game preservation. Recently, some gamers have united to take legal action against Ubisoft following the developer’s discontinuation of The Crew‘s online services, rendering the online-only game completely unplayable. Game preservation has been making rounds for a decade now with the rise of live-service titles and the slow death of physical copies. Those physical retail copies that still remain usually contain no physical disc at all and instead give players a code to be then redeemed at any given online store such as Steam.
Xbox itself has already made promises to preserve gaming’s history over three years ago (thanks VGC), when Microsoft’s chief gaming executive Phil Spencer called publishers and industry giants to figure out a way to tackle the issue. Aside from more backward compatibility for the Xbox, Microsoft is nearly indistinguishable from other publishers who focus on digital copies and stores, meaning our ability to play the games we enjoy decades into the future, ’90s-style, is still in jeopardy.
