The appropriately and bluntly named "Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC" program kicks off today with compatibility for BLiNX: The Time Sweeper, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, and Fuzion Frenzy. PC players can download each title for $10, but those with Xbox Game Pass subscriptions or existing digital licenses for these games on console will have instant access without an additional purchase (no such luck if you simply stick an original Xbox disc in your PC drive, alas).
Playing these older Xbox titles on PC enables some bonus graphical features like Vsync support, anisotropic filtering, enhanced anti-aliasing, and up to 4x resolution scaling of the original SD signal (to 2560x1920). Games are limited to their original frame rates and aspect ratios, though, which means a 30 fps 4:3 image in most cases. Microsoft says this first batch of games should be playable with 11-year-old GTX 950 graphics hardware, but recommends a 2017-era GTX 1070 Ti with 8GB of VRAM for best performance.
Microsoft has announced Xbox Backward Compatibility for PC, a new preservation program that will let players run select classic Xbox games on Windows PCs and handhelds like the ROG Xbox Ally. Tom's Hardware reports: "This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve XBOX games from the past and bring them to PC over time," the company said in a blog post authored by Xbox "VP next generation" Jason Ronald. Alongside backward compatibility, the company says games will also include new features. The four titles in the announcement are: BLiNX: The Time Sweeper; Conker: Live and Reloaded; Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge; and Fuzion Frenzy.
You can now buy all of these games on PC, and they're also included in all Xbox Game Pass plans. Anyone who already owns these titles digitally on console can also now play them on PC or handheld, with support for Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Crucially, this appears to be a digital-only preservation effort, so it won't help anyone who only owns physical copies of these games. Xbox has reportedly been testing a way to digitize physical games as far back as Xbox One, but that hasn't yet materialized yet.
Alongside the preserved original gameplay, Xbox claims these games will let users customize graphics settings, with up to 4x resolution scaling, VSync support, Fullscreen and Windowed modes, anisotropic filtering, and enhanced anti-aliasing, with more features to come in the future. Notably, Xbox will add achievements to select original Xbox games on console and PC.
Nearly 20 years ago (!), in 2007, I published my first and only book: Microsoft 2.0. It focused on changes I expected at the company in the “Post-Gates” era. What would remain the same and what likely would be different once co-founder and CEO Bill Gates had left the building?
CEO Satya Nadella has not exited the company (yet). But there’s no question that Microsoft and its mission have morphed considerably in the past year or two. I’m not quite ready to christen this the Microsoft 3.0 era, even though Nadella handed the reins of Microsoft’s dominant commercial business to Judson Althoff nearly a year ago.
That decision resulted in Nadella moving into more of a “founder mode” role, allowing him to focus less on the day-to-day work of running the business. (Microsoft historians may recall that Gates made a somewhat similar move back in 2000 when he became Microsoft’s chief software architect.)
While it might not yet be time for Microsoft 3.0, we arguably could be in the “Microsoft 2.5” era. Windows and Office are still around and still play a big role. Microsoft still builds and sells developer tools and databases. But there’s no question that the cloud and all things AI are at the top of the pecking order now.
I’m embarking on a series here at GeekWire that will focus on what matters to Microsoft and, by extension, to its customers, partners, investors, and employees these days. Who are some of the people shaping and leading the company? What are their opportunities and challenges right now?
Over the next few weeks, I will be profiling various Microsoft execs working on plans for Microsoft’s ongoing evolution. Some are company veterans; some are newcomers. I’ll be talking with top execs from Microsoft’s Security, Copilot, Windows + Devices, Xbox, GitHub, and more.
I’m interested in their strategies for Microsoft’s key products and technologies and how they plan to try to turn Microsoft’s ambitious vision into reality. What are their teams building? What do they see as their biggest challenges and opportunities? And where do they see the technologies in their respective areas heading?
I feel like many of us who’ve been keeping track of the biggest tech companies (myself included) have fallen into the trap of blaming or attributing everything a company does to AI. Layoffs? AI is the culprit. Price increases? It’s all thanks to AI. Changing sales strategies? Chalk it up to AI …
But upon further reflection, I believe Microsoft’s strategy is more nuanced than “AI or bust.” There’s no question that Microsoft’s AI ambitions are shaping its goals and tactics. But Microsoft, as a heavily enterprise-focused entity, can’t simply stop supporting products that aren’t built from the ground up with AI (as much as it might like to do so). Nor can it just leave behind customers who aren’t 100% onboard with its AI moves.
Couple those enterprise hurdles with some not-so-popular consumer decisions, like axing 3,200 people in the gaming unit, and Microsoft’s approach to turning the ship looks a lot trickier.
Our Microsoft 2.5 series kicks off Thursday. Stay tuned.
Microsoft launched Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC, bringing four classic original Xbox games to Windows and handhelds for the first time, complete with upscaling, VSync, and achievements coming later this year.
Microsoft is adding seven games, including remastered versions of Halo and Hexen + Heretic, to Game Pass in the coming weeks, but it’s removing eight others.
ROCKVILLE, Maryland—Hundreds of Bethesda Game Studios and Zenimax Online Studios employees and their supporters braved nearly 100° F temperatures to protest sweeping layoffs across Xbox during a lunchtime rally in front of parent company Zenimax's headquarters today. The rally was one of five today organized by Zenimax Workers United and its parent union, the Communication Workers of America, at offices across Texas, California, and Montreal.
Attendees held up signs with messages like "Layoffs... layoffs never change" and "Our players deserve better" as union organizers and employees rallied the crowd with speeches and songs. The overwhelming message was one of solidarity and a willingness to push back against job cuts they say have decimated their development and quality assurance teams.
"It's about us building our movement and making sure that we get seen and we're visible," Bethesda technical producer and union volunteer organizer Nathan Hahn told Ars. "Because we want to make sure that we're not okay with these layoffs and that Xbox knows."
NVIDIA becomes the exclusive PC partner for Gears of War: E-Day, adding DLSS 4.5, ray tracing, and shader-stutter fixes ahead of its August beta and October release.
Microsoft may soon test Positron, a rumored Xbox feature that converts physical games into transferable digital licenses while preserving lending, resale, and ordinary disc access.
Scenes from this week’s founder open house on the deck at GeekWire HQ in Seattle, where we also recorded this week’s podcast. Thanks to Delta Air Lines, Prime Team Partners, WTIA and ALLtech for sponsoring the event. (Photos by Kurt Schlosser and John Cook)
On this week’s show, we’re on the GeekWire deck for our annual founder open house, where we dig into Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs — including a major Xbox shakeup — and the surprising rise of hardware companies on the GeekWire 200.
Then we sit down with four guests to talk about how AI is reshaping how they build:
Jana Schuster of StackIQ, whose AI-native platform helps companies find redundancy in their software spending — like Rocket Money, but for business — with a small team.
Boaz Ashkenazy of Shift AI, who’s setting up always-on agents and rethinking how we interact with AI tools.
Finally, this week’s GeekWire Trivia Challenge: how a longtime T-Mobile executive got his start in the wireless business, and the star-studded history of T-Mobile celebrity endorsers.
It might not be a full Zuck, but Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is getting lots of attention, and not in a good way, for the latter this week.
Sharma was named Thursday to co-lead a new Federal Reserve “Productivity and Jobs” task force, charged with assessing the economic impact of AI and other new technologies on the labor market. Her co-leaders: Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and vocal AI booster, and Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, who is currently on leave at Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI chatbot.
The gaming press, as you can imagine, is having a field day. The headline from Kotaku sums it up: “Xbox CEO Will Advise Federal Reserve On Jobs After Mass Layoffs.”
PC Gamer, for its part, noted that the task force is supposed to represent a “commitment to price stability and maximum employment.” However, that’s the Fed’s broad mandate, as described by Chairman Kevin Warsh. It’s actually not the specific mission of the Productivity and Jobs task force, which is narrower: assessing what AI and other new technologies are doing to the economy.
In a separate sign of the backlash, Microsoft communications chief Frank Shaw took to X on Friday to knock down claims that the Xbox cuts were made to replace employees with foreign workers, calling it “bad information” and noting that the H-1B visa figures being cited are company-wide renewals, not Xbox-specific. He also pointed out that Sharma is “an American born, raised, and educated CEO, from Wisconsin.”
Also lost in the coverage of the Fed appointment is the fact that Sharma is less than five months into the job, having taken over as Xbox CEO in February with a mandate to turn around and preserve a gaming division that spent more than $20 billion over five years while its core revenue shrank. The restructuring announced this week is a key part of that effort.
What’s more, it’s hard to imagine that this is the timing Microsoft or Sharma wanted. Announcements like this are often outside the control of the participants. The Federal Reserve sets its own schedule.
Still, it’s tough timing for an executive who announced plans this week to cut 3,200 gaming jobs — about 1,600 immediately, with the rest over the coming year — amounting to roughly 20% of Xbox’s workforce. Sharma herself called it the most significant restructuring in the division’s history.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht Launchpad, for the record, is currently cruising the waters off Juneau, Alaska, a full 900 miles from Seattle.
4 generations of Xbox hardware. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde)
Commentary: The last couple of weeks have served as a capstone to what’s become a bad few years for the international video game industry. Now it appears the larger sector is headed directly into a significant crash, as several unsustainable practices all seem to be approaching a crisis point at once.
The first and most obvious issue is the ongoing component shortage. Due to the rush to build AI data centers, both RAM and solid-state drives have risen dramatically in price in 2026, with analysts forecasting that costs might not settle back down until at least 2028.
Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S are at the point in their life cycle when they’d ordinarily be declining in per-unit costs as the technology matured. Instead, both Sony and Microsoft have raised console prices multiple times this year due to the high demand for parts.
This would ordinarily be a great time to get into video games, as we’re almost six years into the current console generation. Instead, it’s one of the worst. The base PS5 and Series X are about as expensive as they were at launch in November 2020, and building a new gaming PC right now can be costly.
The component crunch also harmed the debut of Valve’s new Steam Machine, which officially launched late last month with a starting MSRP of $1,049. Valve, based in Bellevue, Wash., was forced to offer the new hardware at a significantly higher price than planned due to the difficulty in getting components.
That’s been reflected in its early reviews, with manyoutletsnoting that the Steam Machine’s current price doesn’t match its power. At $700, the Machine would be a great gateway product for PC gaming, the way the Steam Deck was, and a genuine competitor in the console field, but a $1,049 price tag makes it an expensive curiosity for financially secure gadget-heads.
Another bad sign came from Sony’s recent announcement that it would sunset physical media for the PlayStation platform by 2028. This decision, which allegedly took many of Sony’s publishing partners by surprise, has serious knock-on effects for collectors, historians, developers, and most prominently consumers.
Sony has already caught one lawsuit over alleged market exploitation on the PlayStation Store, and that was a few days before it announced it wants to kill discs. An all-digital PlayStation library means that Sony would get to exercise full monopolistic control over pricing and access for every game it sells; licensing agreements mean that anything purchased on a digital storefront like the PlayStation Store is subject to deletion at any time without notice; and players wouldn’t be able to resort to any of the usual cost-cutting measures such as bargain bins, buying used copies, or even trading games with a friend.
That suggests that Sony has decided its best path forward is to continue to extract money from its established audience, rather than to have more options in place for gaming on a budget. There are free-to-play games on the PS5, of course, but most if not all are cross-platform and/or designed as money sinks. Ask any parent whose kids accidentally ran up a big tab in Fortnite.
Sony’s PlayStation 5. (Sony press image)
If Sony has decided to end physical media, then it’s likely Microsoft will follow suit. While Xbox hasn’t mentioned its next-generation console, codenamed Project Helix, for a hot minute, it has been eager to get rid of discs since at least 2013. Some sources, such as Windows Central, allege that Xbox is already planning to do so.
(Meanwhile, Nintendo is likely to do its own thing. While Nintendo has been forced to raise the price of the Switch 2 alongside its competitors, it has offered no sign that it plans to stop selling game cards or Switch cartridges. In an uncertain world, Nintendo can be relied upon to only ever follow its own peculiar instincts.)
This sets up an early look at the environment that surrounds the 10th generation of console hardware. If both Sony and Microsoft stick to traditional timelines, we’re likely to start hearing more about the PlayStation 6 and Project Helix over the course of 2027, with launch in holiday 2027 or 2028.
If they do launch along that timeline, then it’s difficult to see how either system will retail for less than $1,000, since the storage and RAM supplies will still be constrained by that point. That automatically prices most of the potential audience out of the market. Once the starting costs hit the four-digit range, a console stops being a hobby or a toy for children and becomes an expensive extravagance. (As a general rule, you probably don’t want your console to cost significantly more than the TV you’re attaching it to.)
Further, it’s arguable that neither the PlayStation 5 nor the Xbox Series X|S have really hit their potential. Sony has famously squandered much of this generation on a largely abortive pivot to games-as-a-service, while Xbox has often seemed more interested in laying off developers than actually making or marketing games. The 9th generation of consoles has had a few big hits, but it’s mostly despite itself.
Not only is there likely to be limited demand for the 10th-generation PlayStation or Xbox, but neither of them actually seem necessary. The only reason to make them is for a brand refresh, and that’s got nothing to do with consumers.
Microsoft, following its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023, is currently the second largest game developer in the world, while Sony dominates today’s console market. These two companies influence much of what happens in the modern video game industry, and as of right now, both are apparently determined to do the most short-sighted thing possible at any given time.
Sony has decided that only part of its audience actually matters, while Microsoft seems to be saddling Xbox with unrealistic expectations, possibly to justify its eventual sale or shutdown, and is ignoring at least one organized boycott.
Reggie Fils-Aimé (center) leads a roundtable discussion of Xbox architects to celebrate the platform’s 20th anniversary in 2021. Left to right: Robbie Bach, Ed Fries, Fils-Aimé, Peter Moore, Bonnie Ross. (Microsoft Alumni Network)
Whenever the video game industry undergoes any kind of significant disruption, someone somewhere always asks if it’s the start of another “Crash of ‘83.” This is usually hyperbole, but it’s hard not to see the parallels between then and now: the video game market is flooded, there are few true exclusives left outside of Nintendo, many members of the gaming audience buy as few as 2 games a year, and the end of physical media will end both retail support and much of the casual audience.
This is unfolding as a slow, years-long plummet rather than the comparatively sudden shock of ‘83, but a crash is a crash. It’s avoidable, but it would require a massive, simultaneous course correction from several of the largest entertainment companies in the world.
That being said, it’s unlikely that video games as a medium are facing any kind of existential threat. Nintendo, as noted above, is well-positioned to ride out any potential problems with the larger market, PC gaming is hanging on, and the mobile sector is actually having a sort of quiet renaissance right now. There will still be video games to play in 2030, barring some larger disaster.
If there’s one big opportunity here, it’s that many of the major players in the games industry have either voluntarily abandoned the market for budget gaming or have been forced out by component costs. Some of the biggest hits of the 2020s to date, such as Vampire Survivors, Among Us, Lethal Company, and Balatro, are cheap, retro-styled games designed to run on almost any hardware, from a PlayStation 5 to your 4-year-old tablet.
The best step forward for mainstream gaming, then, might actually be to take a step back, in a similar way to projects such as Panic’s Playdate retro handheld (still going strong 5 years later) or Seattle’s Tin Can, seeing success with its land-line phones for kids and families. Chasing bigger games, higher frame-rates, and more realistic graphics for 30 years has gotten us here, up to the edge of a second major crash, while thousands of people log on every day to play games that could be run on a particularly big potato.
Instead of rushing into the 10th generation, the solution now might be to think simpler and cheaper, making smaller, more focused projects rather than the 5-year moonshot of a typical AAA game. Otherwise, mainstream video games may end up like Western comics: increasingly expensive options presented to a shrinking handful of fervent fans.
— Mike Torres, a former executive at Amazon, Microsoft and Google, has joined Dropbox as the company’s first chief product officer.
“As a product leader, joining a company that helped pioneer product-led growth is energizing…” Torres said on LinkedIn. “In this role, my focus will be simple: help Dropbox ship the right things at the right time for our customers.”
Seattle-based Torres comes to Dropbox from Google, where he served as vice president of product for Chrome. Before that, he spent more than a decade at Amazon, most recently as VP of Kindle. At Microsoft, he led teams working on OneDrive, Windows Movie Maker and other products.
Chris Sambar. (LinkedIn Photo)
— T-Mobile appointed Chris Sambar as chief enterprise officer, effective no later than Oct. 14. Sambar will lead the Bellevue, Wash.-based company’s small- and medium-sized business, enterprise and government units.
Sambar joins from Public Storage, where he serves as chief operating officer. He was previously at fellow communications giant AT&T for more than two decades, most recently as a president of the company’s global network organization overseeing architecture, engineering, construction, operations, tower strategy and program management.
“Chris is a seasoned wireless industry leader with proven experience including expanding high-growth businesses and seizing market opportunities,” said Srini Gopalan, CEO of T-Mobile.
T-Mobile made two additional C-suite changes:
Mike Katz. (LinkedIn Photo)
Chief Business & Product Officer Mike Katz has resigned to “pursue new professional interests,” according to a press release. Katz was with the company for more than 28 years and will remain in a strategic advisory role through the end of the year. Gopalan offered his “sincere gratitude to Mike for his incredible contributions to T‑Mobile.” Read more about his departure in this GeekWire story.
André Almeida‘s C-suite role has expanded and his title has been updated to chief marketing, brand and broadband officer. He previously served as chief broadband, enterprise and emerging business officer. In the new position, Almeida will help oversee the company’s consumer wireless and broadband businesses.
Kevin LaChapelle. (LinkedIn Photo)
— After 37 years with Microsoft, Xbox Vice President Kevin LaChapelle was among those laid off this week, with the cuts hitting the gaming division particularly hard as the company aims to overhaul the division.
LaChapelle was hired by the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant in 1989 as a software design engineer and joined the Xbox team in 2012.
“I will say my fondest memories are of leading the team of very talented engineers who built the Xbox Backward Compatibility program,” LaChapelle said on LinkedIn. When Phil Spencer, then head of Xbox, announced the program at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2015, LaChapelle added, “The audience’s reaction was unbelievable.”
Adam Shoenfeld. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Adam Schoenfeld has resigned as chief marketing officer for Inflection.io. In April, the B2B marketing automation company acquired Keyplay, a Seattle startup co-founded and previously led by Schoenfeld. The deal reunited Schoenfeld and Inflection CEO Aaron Bird, who have known each other for many years and have collaborated and invested in each other’s companies.
Schoenfeld said on LinkedIn that he “had the best of intentions” when he committed to the acquisition, but then burnout hit him. “I was embarrassed and disappointed in myself. I dreaded telling the team. I didn’t want to bail and let people down… I’m sure others have been in this place,” he added. “After facing the hard conversations, I’m excited to look ahead.”
Schoenfeld remains a part-time CMO advisor for the business and also produces Adam’s GTM Report, which provides data-backed research, maps and tools for leaders and builders in the space.
— Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space Technologies named former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil to its board. Weil has held leadership roles at Planet, Meta, Instagram and Twitter and also serves on the boards of Cisco and The Nature Conservancy.
Stoke Space builds reusable rockets and raised $860 million from investors in its latest round. It’s No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
— Skippy Shaw has joined fusion startup Helion Energy as director of Washington government affairs. The Everett, Wash.-based company is working to build what could be the world’s first commercial fusion facility in Central Washington. Shaw joins Helion from The Nature Conservancy, where she led state governmental relations for TNC’s Washington chapter.
— David Langworthy announced that he has resigned from Microsoft after nearly 25 years, leaving the role of architect for Azure OpenAI. Langworthy, who worked as a founding member of Azure OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, GenAI, MAC, and Azure AI Services, is the founder and CTO of a stealth startup based in Bellevue.
— Carissa Allen has also left Microsoft, departing as director of strategy for the company’s events, including Ignite and AI Tour. On LinkedIn, Allen called her resignation after nearly 30 years “my Valiant Reboot Project (no “retirement” here) because you know I’m not finished yet.”
— And in case you missed it:
Bill Colleran, a veteran technology executive who previously led Impinj, has joined Seattle-based AI coding startup Adronite as CEO. Edward Rothschild, who co-founded and previously led the company, is transitioning to chief technology officer. Read more in this GeekWire story.
Nick Parker, a 26-year Microsoft veteran who led the company’s worldwide commercial sales business, is leaving to become Nvidia’s new sales chief, effective Aug. 24. Read more here.
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