Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox was also praising the DualSense controller, perhaps Microsoft is preparing to release an updated Xbox Series controller.
„I wish as an industry we’d come together and help preserve the history of what gaming is about, so we don’t lose the ability to go back. I think about what the Paley Center did for TV. Paley early on saw the TV industry was getting ready to throw away the tapes that these old TV shows were on, and he said, ‘Hey, I want to archive those because at some point, somebody will want to go back and watch the Ed Sullivan show or something, and those things shouldn’t be thrown away.’
As an industry I would love it if we came together to help preserve the history of what our industry is about, so we don’t lose access to some of the things that got us to where we are today,” Phil Spencer said during the Kinda Funny podcast below. TV archiving is indeed something that Paley Center is leading. Video game preservation, however, is something different, but in Sweden, Embracer Group is preparing for this task.
„Seeing more people playing something like Prey, or Dishonored, or you can go back to Fable, you can talk about those games, and for us, as we sit back as a creative organization and watch what people are interested in, it gives us more data to think about things that we might pick up and take forward with new ideas and new teams that might want to go do that.
[Xbox] Game Pass has been a great source. It was amazing when Bethesda came in and we were able to put so many of the ‘old new’ games, or ‘new old’ games, into Game Pass and go back with the legacy that we have with some of the IP. Even thinking about things like Rare Replay was a really interesting thing for us to go do, and letting people go and experience some of the old Rare IP. It doesn’t have to be a GAAS [game as a service] version of a game. It can just be, hey, this game sits there, and people enjoy it on the service,” Spencer added.
He didn’t forget to praise Sony for the DualSense controller, which innovated with haptic feedback and adaptive triggers: „We’re thinking about different kinds of devices that can bring more games to more places. There’s probably some work that we’ll do on the controller. I think Sony’s done a nice job with their controller and we kind of look at some of that and there are things that we should go do.”
And he also talked about the PC, regarding VR: „We’re watching what happens on PC. As it relates to VR specifically, the best experience that I’ve seen is Quest 2 and I just think its untethered [nature] and ease of use in its capability just doesn’t to me require it being connected to an Xbox in any way.”
Game preservation will be interesting for PC titles, especially if they use Denuvo (and ADDITIONAL DRM on top of it, as is the case with Resident Evil: Village, which will be mentioned later today!). If they do not get a scene/bypass release, then they will no longer work if the „calling home” servers are shut down.
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