Last week saw the big release of Antstream Arcade on Xbox, which brought over 1400 retro games to the platform via the cloud-streaming service, and at least for the time being, it's a service that's actually console exclusive on Xbox.
The reason for that is largely down to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, as revealed by Antstream Studio Head Mike Rouse in a recent interview with the Xbox Expansion Pass podcast. Rouse mentioned during the chat that he already knew Spencer from his previous work in the industry, and a meeting was set up last year to discuss an Xbox version:
"I got in contact with Phil Spencer, and we had a meeting with him, and he loves games preservation - he talks about it a lot, but when you see him and you're one-to-one and you're talking about it, he's extremely passionate about it."
"He essentially gave us the go-ahead to get it working on Xbox, and so we've spent the last year getting our tech in place and optimising the code so that it can run on Xbox. And without the support of Phil and his team, it may never have come over."
Interestingly, Rouse revealed that there was a lot of discussion about whether to postpone the launch until later in 2023 due to a brand-new interface and many other features that are being built for Antstream Arcade at present, but the decision was made to release in July due to a fear of "getting lost with all the big AAA releases at Christmas".
As a result, Xbox players should hopefully be able to experience the new interface before the end of the year as well as some other cool additions - and we already know that many more PlayStation 1 games are on the way too!