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Microsoft recently announced that next month it will begin publishing original programming for the Xbox platform under the moniker “Xbox Originals.” Given the recent success of original programming by Netflix such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, it’s not a surprising announcement that Microsoft is entering the same arena, especially given its marketing history of talking about the Xbox One not as a video game console, but as an entertainment platform.

The Xbox Originals programming will come to Xbox 360 and Xbox One, so people yet to upgrade won’t be missing out on the content.

The biggest show announcement is a Halo television series, for which Stephen Spielberg will serve as executive producer and collaborate with 343 Industries and Amblin Television. Additionally, Microsoft lists a Halo digital feature as well, which will be produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan (from Battlestar Galactica, among others). These big names signal a big commitment by Microsoft to making these adaptations worthy of the franchise, and releasing them exclusively to the Xbox platform is a fantastic way to add value relative to the competition on the console front.

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Microsoft has announced that a number of its popular video game franchises could potentially get their own TV shows, reports Joystiq. Vice President of Xbox Entertainment Studios Jordan Levin …
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This November will mark 12 years since the launch of Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming service that currently boasts more than 48 million global users. Ensuring all of those Live members are constantly connected with each other and enjoying all of the service’s many features is paramount to delivering the Xbox experience gamers have come to expect. To pull it off, Microsoft has staffers working around the clock at its Xbox Live Operations Center (XOC) in Redmond, Washington, reports Total Xbox.

As part of their job function, XOC staffers respond to clear-cut problems. The majority of their time, however, is dedicated to ferreting out issues that no one knows about. Team members search for irregularities and investigate them to discover whether or not they are problems that need solving. They can’t guess at whether something is a threat to uninterrupted Xbox Live service or not; they have to know. They have to find out.

Microsoft Gaming Ninja (yes, that’s his real job title) Eric Neustadter informed Total Xbox that his team has to be ready for anything at all times. “It’s a bit like being in the fire department or police, where you have to think through what would I do in [a worst case] scenario. My boss was in the fire department for years, and he went from doing that to running services like this. In a lot of ways, it is a similar mindset.”

Redundancy is Neustadter’s go-to tool for preventing an Xbox Live doomsday scenario. “We have all the things you need to run 24/7/365, like multiple power grids connected into the campus,” he explained. “When that fails, we have diesel generators with huge tanks out there so that we can run for roughly 72 hours without power, and then we can bring in tankers with more diesel and refill the tanks while they’re running. We also have a disaster recovery site… somewhere else on a different power grid with almost all of this replicated so we can go over there and work instead.”

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Major Nelson released a preview of new features coming to the Xbox One yesterday. These include Blu-ray support for 50Hz video output with a promise of more updates to …
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Microsoft has plans in place to add one of the most-requested features missing from its next-gen Xbox One video game console — backwards compatibility. Responding to an audience member who asked if there were plans in place for Xbox 360 emulation on the Xbox One at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in San Francisco, the platform holder’s Partner Development Lead Frank Savage confirmed that such plans do indeed exist, reports Kotaku.

“There are [plans for Xbox 360 emulation on Xbox One], but we’re not done thinking them through yet, unfortunately,” Savage stated. “It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the X86 stuff. So there’s nothing to announce, but I would love to see it myself.”

When they launched this past November, neither Microsoft’s Xbox One nor Sony’s PlayStation 4 came equipped with backwards compatibility for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, their respective predecessors. The Xbox 360 was capable of playing select original Xbox games. Early PlayStation 3 models were capable of full PlayStation 2 backwards compatibility, while later versions of the console were only able to play digital PS2 games purchased on the PlayStation Store, not original disc-based versions of PS2 titles.

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Titanfall was one of the most-anticipated Xbox One releases thus far, but on its March 11 launch the only-online shooter ran into an unfortunate problem. Xbox Live server issues prevented many pilots from …
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella yesterday made public an e-mail sent to all Microsoft employees detailing some of the new directions in which the company is turning. The company intends …
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Halo: Spartan Assault, originally designed for Windows phones and tablets, released mere months ago for the Xbox One and Xbox 360 but has already received a permanent $5 price …
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It’s no secret: many developers who brought their games to Xbox Live Arcade last generation were put off by the process and Microsoft’s policies. Some even abandoned the platform as a result. It may have taken a few years and a lot of complaints, but word of the indie development community’s malcontent finally made it to Microsoft, and the platform holder decided to do something about it. That something is the ID@Xbox, for which 25 games were announced last week at GDC.

So what’s different this time around? Chris Charla, the program’s director, recently chatted with Digital Spy and answered that exact question. One of the biggest complaints about XBLA was its lack of visibility. Gamers who powered on their Xbox 360s and explored the dashboard weren’t finding most XBLA games. It wasn’t the gamers’ fault, though; Arcade games were buried deeper and deeper away in the increasingly convoluted Xbox 360 menu system nearly every time it was updated. Charla, reiterating previous statements Microsoft has made about ID@Xbox, explained how indie games are now easier to find on Xbox One.

“There’s not a separate section,” he told Digital Spy. “It’s just a game is a game is a game. Games that come through ID@Xbox will be right next to games from any other publisher.”

And since all games are just that, indie games will receive access to everything AAA games do on Xbox One: Kinect, SmartGlass, Upload, Twitch recording, achievements, etc. While Charla admitted that discoverability is a continuing problem for indie games on all distribution platforms, he believes that tearing down the walls that separated such games from big budget releases on Xbox 360 is paramount to solving the problem.

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Major Nelson announced yesterday that the Xbox One’s system update will be made available to all in April. This follows a preview of the system update that was made …
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