Microsoft has formed a new team to maintain games within the Xbox division, as the new team focuses on making existing Xbox games compatible with future devices.
In an internal email, Sarah Bond, the new head of Xbox, explained the company's efforts to preserve its games and other priorities.
“We've created a new team dedicated to preserving games, which is important to everyone at Xbox and to the industry itself,” Bond said in an email.
“As we build on our long history of backward compatibility for gamers, we remain committed to providing an extensive library of Xbox games for the next generation of gamers,” she added.
Game preservation has become a major issue in recent years as games are increasingly removed from digital stores and companies neglect older games, rendering them unplayable after servers are shut down.
Today, April 8th, Nintendo has decided to pull all online Wii U and 3DS games. Microsoft takes game preservation issues more seriously than its competitors.
Windows computers can run games and applications that were developed decades ago.
In addition to dozens of original Xbox games, current Xbox consoles can play hundreds of backwards compatible Xbox 360 games.
In addition to Kinect games, all Xbox One games are also backward compatible with Xbox Series
The migration of Xbox and PlayStation platforms to AMD x86 processors during the last console generation made it easier to achieve backward compatibility.
Microsoft's plans for the next Xbox console could include switching to ARM processors, which would require a compatibility layer to make previous generations of games compatible with the new hardware.
Microsoft's new game preservation team will likely work on developing this level of compatibility.
In his email to employees, Bond also emphasized that Microsoft is working hard on the next Xbox and is focused on making the biggest technological leap in a generation.
AI is part of Xbox's upcoming hardware plans, and as Bond said: "We're innovating in gaming AI and focusing on speed of discovery, interaction, and content creation for players and developers."