Microsoft

Microsoft has been involved with the gaming industry for quite some time. Before their push to the game console market, Microsoft published several popular game series such as Age of Empires, Links, and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

They made a huge leap into the game console market on November 15th, 2001, with the release of the original Xbox.

Since their original console, Microsoft has become a dominant force in the gaming industry. They have quickly grown to be one of the largest game publishers in the world.

Xbox With the Xbox, Microsoft brought a lot of their expertise with computers to the console market.

The Xbox was the first game console to feature a built-in hard disk. This new feature allowed people to save game data directly to the console and not having to rely on separate memory disks.

A year into its release Microsoft made another big move with the release of Xbox Live. Xbox Live serves as a way of connecting players together.

The Xbox saw the release of a few stellar hits. The most notable of these is both the Halo and Fable series.

Even though the Xbox didn’t sell as well as its main competitor, the PlayStation 2, it proved Microsoft was taking the game console market seriously and still managed to beat Nintendo’s GameCube in unit sales.

In terms of emulation, the Xbox has proven to be incredibly difficult. This difficulty may be in part due to the complexity of the CPU and GPU featured in the hardware.

Xbox 360 In 2005, Microsoft released there second console, the Xbox 360.

The Xbox 360 featured Xbox Live as a core component of the console.

The console proved quite trying for Microsoft thanks to various hardware issues with the original hardware revision. The “red ring of death” became a common occurrence due to the console overheating from a poorly designed heatsink.

While Microsoft offered to fix any console that was afflicted with the issue, it did severely damage their reputation in the console industry.

Despite the issues that Microsoft faced with the Xbox 360, they still stuck by it and released several iterations to fix the problem.

During the lifespan of the Xbox 360, Microsoft introduced a new piece of technology. This piece of technology was called “Kinect”. Kinect allowed people to interact with games using their bodies.

The Kinect ended up selling insanely well and proved to be a huge commercial success for the company. This success may have been partly to blame for the Xbox One’s failures.

There have been recent attempts to emulate the Xbox 360 that has proved fruitful, mainly by the Xenia team.

Xbox One In 2013 Microsoft released its third video game console, the Xbox One. The original vision of the Xbox One was for it to be an entertainment hub for everything. It would play media, games, tv and everything else.

Trying to do so much with the console, however, just confused the companies overall message. Many people felt like Microsoft was abandoning the games market to focus on things like TV shows rather than making a great game.

In addition to this, the original release of the Xbox One came with the Kinect sensor. The Kinect was not an optional extra and was required to be plugged in regardless of whether you were using it or not. Not only was the Kinect forced, but it also severely hindered the Xbox Ones already lacking system specifications.

This series of blunders led to several leads leaving the games division. Microsoft eventually appointed a new president for the gaming division, Phil Spencer.

Phil Spencer focused the Xbox division back to gaming and made several sweeping changes such as dropping Kinect.

One of the most impressive improvements brought to the Xbox One under Phil’s leadership was the backward compatibility. The Xbox One can play numerous Xbox and Xbox 360 games. Some games can even be played at higher resolutions than originally intended.

The fact that both the Xbox and Xbox 360 have barely been emulated on the PC shows how big of a feat that would have been to pull off, especially with zero performance degradation.

So far, there have been no solid attempts to emulate the Xbox One on the PC.

Xbox Series X The next game console from Microsoft is set to be released in 2020 with the name “Xbox Series X”. This console will feature full-backward compatibility with the Xbox One as well as other currently unannounced features.

We will update this section when we find out more about the console.