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Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware"
(www.resetera.com)
Archive link: https://archive.ph/NF2r0
At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time.... :-)
It's extremely more likely that they'd put up emulated Nintendo games. We have something bordering on perfect emulation for several of Nintendo's old systems, and we don't have that for Xbox. They can literally just slot in an emulator that someone else coded rather than having to patch in custom emulation code on a per-game basis like they currently do for backwards compatible Xbox games. Again, the point is moot. Microsoft will not own Nintendo, but if anyone else took over Nintendo for any reason, it's much easier to sell fully functioning retro Nintendo games on PC than it is to do the same on PC for old Xbox games.
I'm getting a bit tired of repeating myself. You are responding to a comment that is directed to that particular point.
Microsoft has already figured out how to run older XBox games on PC. As far as the technology goes, XBox One and Series S/X are not compatible with the previous XBoxes, they are PCs in every aspect but branding and closedness. All those games they offer retrocompatibility could be made available on PC. They could put Rare Replay on PC anytime they want. They don't do it because they don't care to do it.
It does not matter that Nintendo emulators are perfect.
They have a working Original Xbox emulator.
They have a working XBox 360 emulator.
They have titles that are entirely owned by them to release, and they only do that on console.
Releasing Nintendo games would be "extremely more likely"? Given that whatever obstacle here is not technical, then the existence of publicly released Nintendo emulators don't change the matter one bit. Meanwhile the licensing complexities only add further obstacles.
You keep making it an axiom of your argument that they just have an emulator ready to go to port all the same games even though the best information we have is that their emulator requires specific tweaks for each game to even get them running on a single hardware target. So you're repeating yourself on an assumption that I don't think is fair to make. That plus their MO is more along the lines of putting out a remaster of Fable or the Master Chief collection on PC for the very few true console exclusives on Xbox. We can agree to disagree and call it here.
It's not uncommon in general emulation to need tweaks for different games, and they already figured those out. If they can get their old games running on Xbox One, One X, Series S and Series X it means they can consistently keep them working across multiple different configurations. At this point, they are perfectly capable of handling a full PC release of these titles if they wanted to. You are getting too caught up in particularities that just don't change the conclusion.
It's not like they'd release a standalone all-purpose emulator. More likely they'd bundle the games with setups that are already tweaked for those particular games. Just as they would need to for Nintendo games. Even Nintendo itself had to do that. The initially flawed Ocarina of Time Switch Online release comes to mind.
It still makes more sense to assume that if Microsoft is not interested in doing it for their own games, there is no reason to assume they would do it for any others.