What changed this week for emulators on XBox – And how you can still run themĪlthough 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. 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. 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. Nonetheless, developers have found ways around this restriction.
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”. Widely distributing it to all XBox users through the app store is another.
Running an emulator in dev mode for your own tests is one thing. Notably though, emulators have pretty much “always” been disallowed on the XBox app store.
