Of the several heated topics to come out of Microsoft’s Build 2014 developer conference, one of the more unintentional conversations was ignited during a Q&A following the “Understanding the Xbox One Game Platform Built on Windows” panel. After the session finished, Frank Savage took questions from the crowd, and here was the very first question:

Q: Are there any plans for an emulator for the 360 games?

A: There are. But we aren’t done thinking them through yet unfortunately. It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the x86 stuff. So there’s nothing to announce, but I’d love to see it myself too.

What we can easily infer from this statement is that the Xbox team is indeed working to bring some sort of backwards compatibility to the Xbox One – a feature currently lacking in all but one of the 8th generation consoles. Whether the emulation will be done locally or via Xbox Live has (obviously) yet to be decided, but with Microsoft’s ongoing push for Azure’s capabilities, the possibility of them taking the digital route seems to be the most likely option. Personally I’d prefer local emulation, but the difference between the Xbox 360 and Xbox One’s architecture and the difficulty of trying to get the PowerPC platform (what the Xbox 360 runs) to work in an x86 environment leads me to believe that cloud-based emulation will be Microsoft’s safest bet.

In the past, Microsoft had stated that they would try to port over select titles or marketplace games to the Xbox One, but this is the first mention of actual emulation planned for the newest edition to the Xbox family.

[via, Kotaku]