More Xbox 360 Games On Windows 8 Details

May 26, 2011 Sam (Insideris) Games, Microsoft, Windows 52

Windows 8 To Support Xbox 360 GamesAs promised, we dug some more information regarding the upcoming Windows 8 feature which will allow users to play Xbox 360 games on their PC’s.

According to our sources, Xbox 360 on PC will have a subscription fee (just like Xbox Live). However, when it comes to online gaming, it will use Windows Live Marketplace and as a result, PC owners will not be able to compete against console owners (at least in initial stage), due to plausible frustrations (mouse vs. controller).

Why would Microsoft do that?

Since software giant plans to launch Xbox 720 (not the real name) in few years, Xbox 360 game sales on PC will not only give company additional revenue but will also extend current generation hardware lifespan.

Again, take it with a pinch of salt.

  • Nooh

    Wow, I was thinking the same thing yesterday and posted this on the last thread . Yes definately agree. People who would like to know about how the future gaming console games will be then check Unigine Heaven benchmark dx11 (also does latest openCL , which isnt as good but its getting there) . Also check stone giant. This is what the new consoles coming should be able to do. Now both Nvidia and AMD have the technology to provide a Console chip which will be built on anything from 32nm to maybe even 22nm . Which is a big chnage as the last consoles gpu and cpu were built on 90nm and went down to 45nm that we see today on the smaller consoles, which makes it possible to be enable to do that. Tessalation shaders have been upped on each new gpu built and are more efficient.

    So yes there is a need of a new console and the time is right and therefore makes sence to maximise xbox360 gaming in the meantime and make monies on it.

    • Wee Jimmy

      You do not know what you are jibbering on about do you.

      • Nathan

        He’s so offtopic, I’m not even sure he read the article.

        • pso2love

          Why not make this available on Windows 7? Why wait till windows 8?

  • Wes

    sounds too far fetched

    • ChrisW

      Maybe far-fetched… but not so much if you think that MS might not support ‘backwards compatibility’ for the next gen by doing so.

  • bobo

    Hmmmmmm so if i pay that monthly fee, i get to play Gears 2-3, Halo 3,Reach, Forza. Or you purchase games separately from Windows Live Marketplace.

    Or that monthly fee is just to be able to play online?

    Cuz we all know what happened last time, when Microsoft tried to force PC gamers to pay monthly online fee, in order to play GFWL titles online.

  • pascal

    well, that would be a bit too friendly wouldn’t it? why let people pay once if you could as well make them pay twice?

    • ImaBrokeDude

      Not really. it will use the same structure as xbox live:
      Local Profile will allow you to play the game offline. Silver Profile will allow online play be

      • superexicted

        So just to be clear we only need to pay a subscription fee ONLY for the online pay? Not for the campaign mode?

        IF SO HALO4 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! on my beast laptp c:

  • Shaun

    Games for Windows Live 2.0? You will NOT be putting an Xbox 360 disc into your Windows 8 gaming rig.

    • djnforce9

      If this is all true and the PC ends up capable of running Xbox 360 software, give it time and hackers will find a way for you to boot Xbox 360 ISO’s (already nicely dumped for you) on your Windows 8 PC unless Microsoft REALLY does a good job locking this system down.

      Now imagine if they started selling Xbox 360 games on Steam: Mind = Blown.

      • Anonymous

        No, emulation requires hardware ridiculously more powerful than the machine you are emulating, not to mention the difficulty of coding. We can’t even emulated original xbox at all, and only some ps2 games work.

  • kache

    Wouldn’t it be simplier just to force the use of a controller for every game (being that the games themselves are coded for pad), instead of not allowing crossplatform?

  • anonymouse

    that would revolutionize portable gaming, if used on laptop. what a great idea.

  • King Reggin

    This is illegal, the only way this could be done is with emulators, which are illegal. Microsoft will be forced to shut down by the government for this.

    • rhett melton

      You are fucking stupid.
      Microsoft owns the Windows OS from the ground up and Microsoft owns the xbox platform from the ground up. Combining the two would not only be legal, it would be utter genius.. and its something that would make xbox ever more unique, because its something Sony simply can’t do.

    • Oh. My. God.

      You are so * stupid it is LITERALLY immeasurable. Your levels of stupidity have now made every single person reading this article just THAT much dumber than they were before. The very act of reading your incoherent dribble has reduced the world’s collective intelligence by a significant amount.

      I hate you. I hate you more than I hate the guy who stole my Transformer’s toy when I was 2 years old.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfYJsQAhl0

      • ^^reply was to King Derpin, not Rhett. Just to make it clear.

    • Wingar

      Emulators are not illegal you.

      • ImaBrokeDude

        It is not illegal but know that creating copies of the content tthe emulator emulates without permission is illegal.

        [Ex. IOSs of xbox games are illegal] BUT Microsoft adding that as a feature saying that you must own the game disk is not.

        Every heard of SafeDisk or SecureRom?

        They will have something like that that will make it hard to create isos and make the game only run with the disk. They even make it so you can’t install the game because it can only run off the disk.

    • vurp0

      This isn’t illegal you know.

    • Nathan

      Then I guess Sony is getting shut down by the gov’t for emulating the PSX on their own devices.

      Please, people, for the sake of others, *THINK* before you post stupid crap.

  • wOlfLinG

    I’m wondering whether, due to the increased power available on PCs, 360 games would become ”PC Only”. As in, claim to be 360 games but actually require too much hardware so that only the PCs could play them.

  • Awumpa

    can i use my live subscription or is a new one

    • hypernova

      It most likely caries over from your 360 if you use the same account.

  • This sounds a little shaky. 360 games would need to be optimized to use a keyboard and mouse to play well. Are they going to require developers to program scripts for every game published? They would have to, if the reasoning behind the author’s statement about the explanation for segregating the two services is correct. I don’t know who the audience for this would be.

    It would make more sense for MS to make the current Games on Demand titles compatible, rather than saying that all 360 discs will play on Win 8 PCs.

    • rc

      No they wouldn’t. I can think of 2 options:

      1. The emulator handles the keyboard/mouse input, translating it into the inputs the game expects. Not ideal, but technically possible.

      2. The software requires a USB XBox style controller to be attached to play the games. Bonus side effect for MS? Uptick in controller sales to PC users.

    • zeb

      actually setting/porting controls over would be pretty easy. most game major game-engines today are already cross-platform and therefore already able to support controller or keyboard. Excellent examples of this is when you plug in your xbox controller to your windows pc and start up a supported game. The game will simply see there is an xbox-controller attached and then switch the keys to the pad instead. I do some hobby game-making in unity3d and torque, both support the xbox joypad out-of-the-box with little to no changes to scripts or code, i suspect that could easily be reverse engineered, or else there is always the option of a patch-download for games that would solve that little issue. Also to people saying that it would be impossible and emu and all that, you all do realize that the xbox 360 runs a stripped down version of windows media center right? and since windows 8 also runs from similar base-code, its mearly a question of allowing the game to execute on “non-xbox-hardware” which could be done easily, again the above mentioned patch idea could work here. Thinking of how emu’s work for ps1’s and the likes, you would need something along the lines of an “xbox360 bios” but i think thats irrelevant (not sure) since its all windows!

      • zeb

        well i just re-read my post and no the xbox360 does run its own os, but it is very similar to windows mce and i still claim that it is a stripped-down modified version of said windows. reading a little around on the web reveals that they do claim it to be a custom os, build from the ground up, but very similar to the windows we know, and using many of the same api’s

  • dutch

    I hope pirates won’t ruin this. :)

  • Me

    well, MS couldn’t kill steam in normal way, so they will destoy it in another way: “Dear devs, why you make PC versions of games, since everybody who have windows 8 have xbox360?”

    • Wingar

      The stupidity in your comment is overwhelming.

  • Kyb

    Good luck to run PowerPC compiled games on a x86/x64 architecture.

    • No

      Most of what’s on an XBox360 disc is resources. Replace the single binary file with a proper exe file (which likely only requires a recompile, if MS has done the SDK properly for this move and abstracted the hardware-specific items from the actual game code) and you have an XBox360 game running on PC. If this service is made available, you’ll pay a monthly fee to get access to these exe files (likely encrypted a la Direct2Drive) for XBox360 games you own. This doesn’t seem as unlikely as people think…check out games like Grand Theft Auto IV on PC which, apart from Games For Windows Live, is almost identical to the XBox360 version. My guess is that MS made some smart decisions when they built the SDK so creating a PC-compatible game is simply a matter of recompiling and running on a machine with adequate resources.

      • Nathan

        Emulating and cross-compiling the binaries isn’t the major problem. The issue is that most standard DVD drives cannot read Xbox 360 discs without firmware or physical modifications, which most won’t ever have the balls to do.

        They’d almost certainly have to be downloaded games, or MS would have to release a 360-ready DVD drive. Maybe they could do that with the hundreds of thousands of HD-DVD drives they have stocked up…

  • somthing tells me this will only be on new titles that support it but the whole point of making a PC game is that you know you can have much better graphics this will just bring outdated graphics to the pc unless they allow the game to be able to change setting when in a PC

  • also i wouldnt do this if you must pay for gold sod that i will stick with Steam

  • houcem

    Guys think of it this way microsoft said that it was preparing something that’s gonna change the world of OS so that could be enabling pc users to have the same advantages like a home console so that will make from windows 8 the only OS that supports everything it s not question of money its question of entering the history by revolutioning the technology

  • Pingback: Rumor: Play Xbox 360 games on Windows 8()

    • EvilC83

      If true then i may star buying 360 games since I’ve been though 6 crapbox3shittyies. Then I could just stay with the PS3.

  • “According to our sources” really? Can you be anymore vague?

    How much inside information has come true on this site, how much has later been shown to be bunk?

  • Stay inrfomatvie, San Diego, yeah boy!

  • Duh

    Has anyone responding to this ever written software for a x86 PC? or a power pc cpu? ever heard of endianess? Even if they made an emulator 360 games would run like crap on a PC

    • Duh

      And its not just the executables, the media (sound, video, etc) would need byteswapped everywhere. fail.

  • Xbox KingMart

    LMAO! HAHAHA, look at all these Microsoft/Xbox haters. All you Sony Slaves, Nintendo Drones and Apple f@ggots are DOOMED! 360 and KINECT FTW!

    IT ONLY DOES EVERYTHING!

  • stupid if you ask me!
    why the hell would people with an xbox 360 want to play their 360 games on pc yet you have to pay sub fee….wtf!?
    worst part is that it isn’t even cross platform play.

    the only good thing about this is that people without an xbox 360 can now buy 360 games and play it. Finally they can STFU about “is this coming to pc”, always harassing the damn devs on their official forums to port sick console games to pc.

    Also would this be the end of PC gaming FOR REAL? PC Gamers aka Pirate Complainers will not bother complaining about porting console games to PC and can finally buy an xbox 360 game and play the game straight without PC trash installation. Also if they stop making games on garbage PC, the pirating level will die down.

    Ok Publishers get to work and shut the annoying PC gamers up!

  • Brian

    This article title is quite misleading.
    Xbox 360 games will NOT be playable natively on windows 8.
    The Xbox Live Service is what’s getting added to windows 8. You’ll be able to log on, chat with friends, send messages, other various simple tasks that would not involve an actual game.
    In order for an xbox 360 game to work on a PC you’d have to emulate to 360 hardware. It will be quite a bit of time before anyone can do this at a speed that would make the game playable.
    The other option is to port the game to PC as most titles are, but then you wouldn’t be playing a 360 game on the PC, you’d be playing a PC game ported from a 360 game.
    You will not be able to stick a 360 game in your PC and play it!

  • raj

    YEAH !!!!Metal gear solid !!! on PC again !

  • Sourav

    Now the unconfirmed claim is confirmed and as for the Crossplatform gaming, it will be fully allowed. Means, Xbox players will be able to play with Pc players!

  • DracoX3

     By 2015 the Xbox360 system will retire and then MS will be releasing the new Console on or before that year. Also, If MS allows their Emulation Software to run on Win8 containing Xbox360 Support files you will have the option of using a controller instead of a Mouse.. All you’ll need is a Xbox360 Controller Remote for your PC (There are quite afew on Amazon.com) and the Driver App from MS. Hope this Helps!

  • Adamtriplex

    houcem your right about that, but sometimes its also about competition, Microsoft could want to push his competition of a cliff just saying