Xbox 360 games in Windows 8 - should we pay attention to this rumour?

Look, the idea of this is pretty awesome. This can extend the lifetime of these games and also expose them to a wider audience (people who don't own consoles). The big spanner in the works here will definitely be the hardware. Sure, if the emulator runs on a decent rig, there will be no issues. Not all people have decent rigs though. This will make it choppy and sometimes unplayable. The Xbox games are made specifically for that console, so graphic settings (to scale it up or down) are basically non-existent in this case. How this will cope is beyond me at this point in time.
 
Its technically feasible using something akin to a 360 virtual machine, the 360 OS is pretty lightweight.

However, just because its possible doesn't mean they will. I don't see why they would want to. Maybe one day when the 360 is off the market it would make sense, why would they want to cannibalize their own market now?

I think the source of the rumor is probably just looking for page hits.
 
TheAvenged87 said:
Look, the idea of this is pretty awesome. This can extend the lifetime of these games and also expose them to a wider audience (people who don't own consoles). The big spanner in the works here will definitely be the hardware. Sure, if the emulator runs on a decent rig, there will be no issues. Not all people have decent rigs though. This will make it choppy and sometimes unplayable. The Xbox games are made specifically for that console, so graphic settings (to scale it up or down) are basically non-existent in this case. How this will cope is beyond me at this point in time.
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I guess the emulator itself might use some resources but I don't know if you'd need a decent rig by current standards. The Xbox is getting a bit long in the tooth now and the graphics card, from what I've heard, is equivalent to a 7800/7900GTX.

I'm sure that you could get away with very cheap rig.
 
"Then of course there is the possibility that Microsoft will release a separate “Xbox Live for PC” version of every Xbox 360 game..."

You know what they call that, A PC GAME.

I'm sorry this whole concept is stupid. Why would I want to pay R200+ more for a game and then run it on emulated hardware, that defeats the entire purpose of a console. Technically it doesn't take much to turn an Xbox game into a PC game, design considerations aside. Not to mention you would be blowing the cost saving factor of console hardware RIGHT out the water since the rig you would need to emulate 360 hardware would far outstrip even the most high-end gaming PC's, so you would be paying 2-3 times that of a high-end gaming PC just so you can run a game looking WORSE than it would if you just played a 'proper' PC game on that same machine.

So to sum up;
  • We would be telling developers "It's fine don't design for PC, we'll just play it like a console game."
  • We would pay R200-R300 more for a game because of royalties for a platform we don't actually use.
  • We would need to spend 5x more for a system to emulate a game than we would have to spend on a system to play a native game, and have that emulated game looking worse than the native game.

I'm not exactly seeing the plus side here. If they want us to play Halo on our PC's then they must release it natively for PC not some emulated kak.
 
I agree. The idea is great; especially for those exclusive xbox titles. Although I also think that it seems highly unlikely that Microsoft will allow people to play Xbox 360 games on PC. Microsoft will loose out on a lot of revenue; unless they recover this cost from selling the emulator software. Might even help selling copies of Windows 8.
 
Ok, i read, unreliable rumour from someone who knows someone who works at MS. (Yeah rediculous, but no better than the info been currently thrown around). Anyway, apparently how its going to work. You can buy you xbox game, the disk won't actually work on your Windows 8 machine. You will just get a license to download a pc version of the game (Since xbox live and windows live are merging). But heres the kicker, to play say the windows version of the game, your xbox will have to be online as well, so MS can check you are not playing the xbox version. You are not going to be allowed to play both versions at the same time.
 
MOnk said:
"Then of course there is the possibility that Microsoft will release a separate “Xbox Live for PC” version of every Xbox 360 game..."

You know what they call that, A PC GAME.

I'm sorry this whole concept is stupid. Why would I want to pay R200+ more for a game and then run it on emulated hardware, that defeats the entire purpose of a console. Technically it doesn't take much to turn an Xbox game into a PC game, design considerations aside. Not to mention you would be blowing the cost saving factor of console hardware RIGHT out the water since the rig you would need to emulate 360 hardware would far outstrip even the most high-end gaming PC's, so you would be paying 2-3 times that of a high-end gaming PC just so you can run a game looking WORSE than it would if you just played a 'proper' PC game on that same machine.

So to sum up;
  • We would be telling developers "It's fine don't design for PC, we'll just play it like a console game."
  • We would pay R200-R300 more for a game because of royalties for a platform we don't actually use.
  • We would need to spend 5x more for a system to emulate a game than we would have to spend on a system to play a native game, and have that emulated game looking worse than the native game.

I'm not exactly seeing the plus side here. If they want us to play Halo on our PC's then they must release it natively for PC not some emulated kak.
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I agree with all of this except the last point. I suspect that the games would run natively (assuming this is true, which I HIGHLY HIGHLY doubt it is), the whole idea wouldn't be feasible otherwise. 5 years from now the games would still chug on the most advanced systems if everything was being emulated and dumped on the CPU.

Remember MS has access to all the resources (their own VM software, drivers, the whole 360 architecture and operating system), its not like an outside party trying to fudge it to work through a "brute force" emulator.

Still though, strategically I can't fathom why they would do this.
 
Gir said:
Confused, you suspect it will, but highly doubt it?
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*Clarifies* I doubt the story is true, but in the very unlikely case that it is true I think the games would run natively or you would need a super computer the size of a house to emulate the games.
 
A game that runs natively on a PC is a PC game, that's the point I was making.

If you compile a 360 game to run on a PC that's not a 360 game running on a PC it's a PC game.
 
MOnk said:
A game that runs natively on a PC is a PC game, that's the point I was making.

If you compile a 360 game to run on a PC that's not a 360 game running on a PC it's a PC game.
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This is related to what i said earlier, you aren't going to be able to put your 360 disk in your pc and play the game, your going to be able to buy a game for the 360 and download a pc version on windows 8.
 
MOnk said:
A game that runs natively on a PC is a PC game, that's the point I was making.

If you compile a 360 game to run on a PC that's not a 360 game running on a PC it's a PC game.
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Emulated games, ported games, same thing! A PC game is a game that was written for, developed on and for PC. Not a game that was developed on a console and then recoded a bit to work on PC.

Anyways, if these rumours are true, then cool. Realistically though, the only game I would like to play that is Xbox exclusive is Alan Wake. None of the other exclusives stand out for me. But I don't see this happening personally, as this would hurt sales of the actual Xbox 360 sales and MS will not lose money and ground to Sony that easily.
 
No- I don't think its true. The emulation environment will be very tricky on PCs especially since they've gone past DX9. I think XBOXes are cheap enough and that people want to play XBOX games will just go out and buy the console.
 
if they have found a way that you cant crack the xbox games on the pc it thinks its possible but then you have guys like razor out there and they can crack anything, so no its not happening, maybe the code that they see is just so that you can track your xbox live account from windows 8
 
Emulated games, ported games, same thing! A PC game is a game that was written for, developed on and for PC. Not a game that was developed on a console and then recoded a bit to work on PC.
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Sorry but that comment makes it fairly clear you are wholly unfamiliar with the technical aspects of games development.

No-one makes games on console, every game is developed on a PC (not sure about Mac tbh) and then compiled for their target platform. If you use something like XNA game studio the difference between generating something you can play on your 360 and generating something you can play on your PC is a single button. Middleware game engines like Unreal Engine 3 or id Tech 5 are designed so you can deploy your game across multiple platforms with minimal effort.

By your definition any game whose lead platform is not the PC is a console game so by that standard you've already played console games on your PC, games like; Gears of War, Fable 1/2/3, Mass Effect 1/2, etc...

The difference between emulation and porting is VAST and no-where close to the same thing. Emulation involves running some sort of hardware abstraction where you are 'tricking' the game into thinking it is running on its native platform. Porting is taking something that was designed to run natively on one platform and re-coding/compiling it to run natively on another.

So games like Minecraft, Torchlight and The Witcher 2 have or are being ported from PC to 360 (not emulated) :) and I would't say the 360 can now play PC games. :P
 
TheAvenged87 said:
The big spanner in the works here will definitely be the hardware. Sure, if the emulator runs on a decent rig, there will be no issues. Not all people have decent rigs though. This will make it choppy and sometimes unplayable. The Xbox games are made specifically for that console, so graphic settings (to scale it up or down) are basically non-existent in this case. How this will cope is beyond me at this point in time.
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I doubt that, I think we get this idea that console emulators require high resources because they are developed by 3rd parties who have to reverse engineer the console's software to build the emulator, where as MS knows what they are doing, they built it, and any modern gaming PC is at least (over all) 50% more powerful then the Xbox 360

afsrav said:
I agree. The idea is great; especially for those exclusive xbox titles. Although I also think that it seems highly unlikely that Microsoft will allow people to play Xbox 360 games on PC. Microsoft will loose out on a lot of revenue;
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MS makes their money from game royalties

Gir said:
Ok, i read, unreliable rumour from someone who knows someone who works at MS. (Yeah rediculous, but no better than the info been currently thrown around). Anyway, apparently how its going to work. You can buy you xbox game, the disk won't actually work on your Windows 8 machine. You will just get a license to download a pc version of the game (Since xbox live and windows live are merging). But heres the kicker, to play say the windows version of the game, your xbox will have to be online as well, so MS can check you are not playing the xbox version. You are not going to be allowed to play both versions at the same time.
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that lame :(
 
Toxin said:
I guess the emulator itself might use some resources but I don't know if you'd need a decent rig by current standards. The Xbox is getting a bit long in the tooth now and the graphics card, from what I've heard, is equivalent to a 7800/7900GTX.

I'm sure that you could get away with very cheap rig.
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well considering the fact that to emulate a ps1 that runs @ 33mhz you need a rig thats atleast 1.4 ghz with 512 megs of ram (to emulate it at decent speeds) what do you think will be required to emulate a triple core multithreading 3.2 ghz cpu (thats not even the hybrid graphics card included which would probably be a mother of a mission to emulate on current nvidia cards (current ati cards have more or less the same architecture as the xenos gpu in the 360) ?
 
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I am somewhat confused by this concept. I am an avid xbox gamer and i love to play on the xbox rather than the pc. BUT it has to be said that pc games generally look better than the console games. I do love good graphics. BUT my point is why would people want to play an Xbox title on a pc? surely they could just get the pc version that would look nicer? personally i find that playing on a console gives me a better feel for the game. E.G Dragon Age or Oblivion. both games are fantastic on both console and pc but for shear looks the pc is better for these kind of games. so why?
 
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