Microsoft have been praised for the relative openness of their latest XBox series to homebrew developers, in particular with its “dev mode” which allows developers (including hobbyists) to create and test XBox applications. For developers willing to take it further and distribute their games, Microsoft’s app store is fairly open to all sorts of games and apps, with a review process which is similar to that of iPhone or Android.

Emulators were always a “no” on the XBox Store

Notably though, emulators have pretty much “always” been disallowed on the XBox app store. Running an emulator in dev mode for your own tests is one thing. Widely distributing it to all XBox users through the app store is another.

Microsoft’s official Store Policies are very clear on emulators, it is not a gray area: Section 10.13.10 clearly states that “products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family”.

Nonetheless, developers have found ways around this restriction. Some devs have found ways to slip through the cracks of the review process, getting emulators on the appstore for a few days or weeks before Microsoft took it down. In another case, developer tunip3 managed to find a way to get retroarch downloaded by thousands of people on their Retail Xbox, leveraging some loopholes in the distribution system of the XBox store, marking the app as a “private” build.

What changed this week for emulators on XBox – And how you can still run them

Although Microsoft would always take down these abuses of their appstore policy, in the past, people who had managed to download and install emulators such as retroarch, were able to access them and play them as long as they didn’t delete them themselves. Those folks were “stuck” with an older version of Retroarch, but could still run it, update its emulation cores, etc…  (and very reminiscent of how we did our VHBL releases for the PS Vita back in the day).

In other words, if you managed to get an emulator to install on your (retail mode) XBox, it was yours to keep. Until now.

This week, Microsoft started enforcing their policy more strongly, and through some kind of signature check, now prevent people from running emulators on their console.

It is still possible to run emulators on the console in dev mode, and people have mentioned that the dev license costs only $2 if you switch your dev account to a Turkish one. ($20 otherwise). Personally, comparing the state of XBox to PlayStation when it comes to hobbyists developers, I feel that $20 is fair if you’re looking for a powerful emulation machine.

Emulators have always worked in dev mode on XBox, while they’ve always been disallowed in retail mode, and the only way to get them to work so far in retail have been loopholes. Save yourself the trouble, get a dev account and enjoy the emus.

Why the Crackdown?

Microsoft haven’t specified why their are cracking down hard on emulators right now, but a few things are clear:

• Emulators were never allowed on retail XBoxes, the only ways to get them to run involved loopholes
• Microsoft, like other software companies, constantly evolve their products, policies, and how they enforce them. In this case, they have boosted the way they enforce their policy on emulators

As to why this is happening now, when Microsoft have been rather lenient about it for almost 3 years, there are two leading rumors that have legs in my opinion:

• First, XBox360 emulator Xenia was released for retail XBox recently. Microsoft do sell X360 games on their appstore, so there was a direct threat to their business here. It was clear that this one wasn’t going to last long
• Secondly, and to me possibly the most likely culprit, considering the history of the involved company, the Dolphin emulator for Wii and gamecube also made its way to the XBox retail consoles earlier this year.

Now, it’s possible that Microsoft decided on their own to take things a bit more seriously with an influx of popular emulators being made available on their console. But, call me paranoid if you want, my personal opinion is that some lawyer at Nintendo gave a phone call to their Microsoft counterpart, and told them a lawsuit was coming their way if something wasn’t done soon.

That’s my take. Just a personal opinion of course, but given how Nintendo tend to be trigger happy when it comes to litigation, I feel this is the most likely reason.

(Note: There are other rumors that Microsoft themselves are working on an official emulator, but I don’t see in what world this would work legally, unless we’re talking “we’ll sell you older Windows 95 games, they will be running on an emulator but that will be transparent to you” kind of thing. Certainly not a Nintendo emulator. I’m no expert of course, and I’d love to be corrected on that, but I really don’t see this happening.)

If anything, I feel this piece of news has been a good reminder for a lot of people that hobbyist devs and emulator enthusiasts are treated way, way better on Xbox than we are on PlayStation (Where it is impossible to run any kind of personal code, let alone an emulator, without powerful hacks and exploits)