How one developer is sneaking emulators through a hole in the Xbox Store

• How the RetroArch menu looks on the Xbox Series X.

Modern gaming consoles have exploded with indie games and apps, but one category has always proven an exception: emulators. This week, however, Ars has learned of an apparent loophole in Microsoft’s Xbox Store system being used to distribute high-performing emulators on the platform.

Microsoft usually doesn’t allow emulators to be published on the Xbox Store, though individual emulators have occasionally (and briefly) sneaked past Microsoft’s approval net in the past. Yesterday, we also wrote about how Xbox owners can use the system’s built-in Developer Mode as a workaround to install their own copy of the RetroArch emulator suite onto an Xbox Series X/S (or Xbox One).

But this new effort, led by a third-party app developer going by the handle tunip3, exploits an apparent hole in the Xbox app distribution system to let users download a “retail” version of RetroArch directly to the console’s main interface, without using Developer Mode.