Xbox has been the most gamer friendly out of the big three between them with Sony and Nintendo, but there are moments that despite being good for business being pro gamer, there are times that it is not good for business being 100% pro gamer.

There was a big conversation in the emulation community as some big names on emulator’s development have noticed that they are no longer able to access the simulators of a game developing environment for Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X which basically are the backbone of the emulators.

Even before the weekend @gamr12, who’s involved with the distribution of the RetroArch emulation software on Xbox, posted the error message they received when attempting to launch emulated content and resulted that you need to be a confirmed developer and hence paying for the tier that allows public distribution of Xbox games to actually access the emulator.

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The explanation for the sudden change was not shared by Microsoft officially, but another user called @Alyanna claims to have a friend in the QA department of Xbox that indeed the enforcing of the developer mode to access the emulator is not an error and was quietly done due to avoid legal issues with Nintendo as apparently, the emulation from the latest Xbox generation give you actually the capacity to play from other platform and go as back as the Playstation 2 era games.

This will make another and surprising victory on Nintendo with its crusade against emulation, as for some year and mainly since the last of Wii U and early years of Nintendo Switch, the japanese company have been doing some incredible victories against emulation community and having court actually siding on their belief that emulation is plain illegal, no question asked.

While I believer that this is a big setback for emulation fans, and as a former emulator user myself, I don’t think that people should be worried for a current gen system and it is highly probably that the emulation development will not stop, it didn’t in the first years of DMCA, I don’t believe it will now.