Retro Games Coming to Xbox - I don't get it

Next week, coming to Xbox, is Antstream Arcade. A cloud gaming service not unlike xCloud but dedicated to retro gaming.
There'll be 1400 games at launch and probably with more coming later.

On July 21st, Xbox players will have access to over a thousand retro games from even Sega, Sony and PlayStation for the first time on Xbox. Of course this is eclipsed by the Activision acquisition, but it is still an interesting service nonetheless.

"Many of us grew up playing these games, so the ability to stream them on Xbox consoles and share these experiences with our friends and family is incredible. We're pleased that with Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub's technology benefits and Azure cloud services we can help enable Antstream to reach more players."

• Sarah Bond from the Xbox team

My biggest problem with this is the pricing. You can either pay $29.99 annually or $79.99 for a lifetime of retro games - "lifetime" for as long as the service lasts of course...

The biggest issue here is that just some months ago we could emulate however much we wanted on Xbox by just downloading a few apps, but Microsoft sadly struck that down and the only way to do so right now is either by paying for developer access or paying a group of hackers to let you in a whitelist that could be taken down.

The state of legal emulation is sad and this is ultimate proof of this. Why streaming retro games? This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Ownership, even if with digital licenses will always be better than a service that can and will be shutdown, no matter what "lifetime" means to them.

This might be great news for some people, after all great games are coming to their Xbox console - but for me it just reminds me of what we had and what was taken away from us: good emulation with our own files and roms.

I'm not gonna say this is entirely a horrible idea, it's just worse than what we used to have on Xbox and downgrades are downgrades no matter how you look at them.

Sure, this might be way more legal than roms, but people still dump them legally and taking away the option to play them is very restrictive.

I get it though, the Xbox is a closed platform, it's not a PC, Microsoft gets to do what it wants - that doesn't take away my right to complain though.

Let's just hope this service is actually good and that it lasts for a long time, depending on the selection of titles and how much money I have left after finishing my PC, I might, just might, end up getting a lifetime license, just for the sake of convenience. I love retro games after all, any opportunity to play them is "good", even if worse than other options. We'll see how this turns out and if I end up subscribing to such a service I'll definitely put up a review of it on here.

Thanks for reading!