Xbox's chief wants to bring Xbox Game Pass and old-school Xbox games to Windows PCs

From PC World: The walls between PCs and consoles keep crumbling down. Microsoft’s spearheading the charge with its stellar Xbox Play Anywhere initiative, which lets you buy a single copy of select Xbox One games and play it on Windows 10 PCs as well, complete with cross-platform cloud saves and multiplayer. But if Xbox head (Xboss?) Phil Spencer has his way, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Spencer told PC Gamer that he wants to bring the Xbox One’s newfound ability to emulate original Xbox games to PCs, along with the recently launched Xbox GamePass—though he stressed that his desires are not an official announcement.

Bringing emulation for original, old-school Xbox games like Crimson Skies and Halo 2 to PCs would be easier than porting over Xbox 360 games, Spencer said. That’s because the original Xbox relied on the same x86 processor architecture that personal computers use, while the Xbox 360 tapped IBM for a bespoke PowerPC chip. The modern Xbox One went back to using x86-powered AMD chips, a boon for the Xbox Play Anywhere push.

As far as the $10 per month Xbox Game Pass subscription goes, Spencer says that the major barrier to entry is the relatively modest number of Xbox Live games available in the Windows Store for PCs. Here’s what Spencer told PC Gamer:

“We don't have the deep catalog of games on PC that we do on console…but I just want to start. So I'm putting a lot of pressure on the team to go get enough content lined up to do something on the PC, and then make sure we have a long-term commitment to build.”

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