According to comments made by Xbox partner development lead Frank Savage, Microsoft has not ruled out Xbox 360 emulation on the Xbox One.

Speaking at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in San Francisco, attended by Kotaku, Savage was asked whether the company is planning Xbox 360 emulation on the Xbox One.

“There are [plans],” Savage said. “But we’re not done thinking about them yet, unfortunately. 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.”

Sony intends to support backwards compatibility using its Gaikai powered PlayStation Now service, and in September Microsoft senior director Albert Penello said the company may eventually be able to do the same with the Xbox One cloud, however he cited difficulties such as managing the quality of the service.

“Using our Azure cloud servers, sometimes it’s things like voice processing. It could be more complicated things like rendering full games like a Gaikai and delivering it to the box,” Penello said. “We just have to figure out how, over time, how much does that cost to deliver, how good is the experience.”

(via CVG)