An Xbox 360 Emulator for Windows 10 Isn’t Enough (Premium)

Microsoft head of Xbox Phil Spencer said this week that an Xbox 360 emulator for Windows 10 was possible. That's nice. But it's not enough.

Like most "news" in the personal tech space, this story is derived entirely from a single tweet, which in this case was a response to a fan question. And it went like this:

Question: Phil, Are we likely to see the back [compatibility] tech applied to Windows 10, allowing us to enjoy 360 games on our PC's?

Answer: Running [Backwards Compatibility] reliably on all the different PC [hardware configurations] would be a lot more work than [with Xbox One], but never say never.

Never say never.

That is the phrase that everyone is hanging on, because of course he is suggesting that such a thing is possible, and could happen. Hey, you never know.

Here's the thing. The clock is ticking.

It's possible that the biggest hangup on an Xbox 360 emulator for Windows is in fact game licensing and not the technology. Tied to that is the viability or desirability of running those games today on other platforms. I mean, at some point, those tired old Xbox 360 games just become tired and old. Nostalgia can only get you so far.

By which I mean, the sooner the better: If Microsoft is able to pull off Xbox 360 emulation in the next year or two, that may be too late for it to even matter. We want those games moved forward to our PCs today. Now.

But, again. That is not enough.

The one thing really missing from the whole Xbox strategy today is mobility. The closest thing Microsoft has to a mobile Xbox platform now that Windows phone has bit the dust is the Surface Book with Performance Base, which starts at $2400 and probably delivers about 1.5 hours of battery life while playing a modern AAA game.

Now what might a mobile Xbox device that plays Xbox 360 games look like? What if Microsoft could lock the performance to a certain chipset design to ensure that it just works? What if ...there were an Xbox Surface tablet? That ran Xbox 360 games in an emulator?

That device could be amazing. It could offer better battery life, since the needs of a typical Xbox 360 game are so much less dramatic than those of modern AAA Xbox One/Windows 10 titles. It could be less expensive because the hardware wouldn't need to be so high-end. But it could still be a Windows 10 tablet/2-in-1.

It could also be a phablet-sized device, perhaps with a built-in or attachable controller. Such a device, with its small screen, would provide even better battery life.

This is the real need here, not just for more Xbox games in more places, but for Xbox to go truly mobile for the first time, viably, in its existence. And everything that Microsoft needs to make it happen is already in place: The Hyper-V-based emulation technologies in Windows 10, the modern PC hardware platform from Intel or even ARM, the controller compatibility, and so on.

Licensing ... well, you are right to wonder whether that will remain an issue, as...