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Microsoft Announces Xbox One Backward Compatibility
dotarray writes: Mike Ybarra is head of Platform Engineering at Xbox, and today he told the gaming world all about one of Microsoft's best-kept secrets — after more than a year of saying it couldn't be done, the Xbox One really is backwards compatible, so you can play all your Xbox 360 games on your next-gen console.
The reason they didn't want this to begin with (i'm speculating here) is profit. They wanted to make people buy newer and more games. That didn't work, so now they have to pretend when they said it couldn't be done that they weren't lying.
I should have been a no-brainer for Microsoft to sell an XBOX One to. I bought the original XBOX shortly after it came out; I followed up with an XBOX 360 purchase as well. I'd never purchased any other console brand, and had been a faithful XBOX user from day one. But Microsoft XBoned its launch with a bunch of boneheaded, anti-customer moves like over-the-top DRM, always-required internet access and a refusal to provide backwards-compatibility, requiring extra shelf space and an extra input on my TV just to keep my existing games.
Sure, they have backpedaled on all of this by now, but it's far too little, too late. I haven't forgotten how Microsoft made clear to me that they saw me with disdain, and they've lost me for good. This promise of backwards-compatibility comes only out of desperation because they're being outsold more than two to one by Sony. There is zero chance I will ever consider an XBone, and the chances of me even considering their next next-gen console are slim to none unless Sony does something even more boneheaded.
They've lost the battle *and* the war, and yet now they've decided to actually put up a fight once it's already too late. It's laughable, really...
This is why I love competition. I have never owned a Sony gaming system and I never plan to, but if nothing else, Sony's powerful existence in the space has kicked Microsoft's ass into high gear and the result is a much better Xbox One.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I see a lot of cynicism in this thread - much of it entirely deserved. However, from a broader perspective, this is undoubtedly a good thing - and not just in terms of "yay, I can play more things on my new console".
Why? Because it goes some way towards mitigating what was looking like a real risk of a "lost generation" of console games.
As older platforms have gone out of circulation, PC emulation has generally been there to keep titles playable. Hell, when my first-gen back-compatible PS3 died on me and I had to replace it with a non-back-compatible slim model, I was able to carry on playing my PS2 games from the original discs via PC emulation.
But there is currently nothing like working emulation of the 360 and PS3 and, given those platforms DRM measures and general hardware eccentricity, it seems reasonable to suppose that we are years, if not decades, from actually seeing it (if we ever do).
Neither 360 nor PS3 hardware was of the highest quality. The early builds of both consoles had high failure rates - legendarily so in the case of the 360 - and while later iterations improved matters somewhat, there's no getting around the fact that they both remained essentially disposable and short-lived devices built as cheaply as possible.
So at some point in the not-too-distant future (within5 years maybe? Certainly within 10) working 360s and PS3s are going to get harder and harder to find. And with no emulation for them, there is a good chance that a good chunk of the (huge) catalogue of games for those platforms is going to end up inaccessible to everybody bar specialist collectors.
Now, a good chunk of the library for both consoles is basically disposable junk anyway. Does it matter massively if a few iterations of Madden and FIFA end up lost to posterity? Not really. In other cases, games are being "rescued" via "HD remasters" for current generation platforms (which can, admittedly, feel like a rip-off), as has happened with The Last of Us and and as will soon happen with Gears of War and Uncharted. In other cases, developers looking to make money from their back-catalogue may put out PC ports. We've seen this rescue a few absolute classics like Valkyria Chronicles, as well as some more... shall we say... eccentric choices like the Hyperdimension Neptunia games.
But that still leaves a lot of games - including those which were subject to exclusivity agreements but didn't sell well enough to merit an HD-remaster - stranded. There are some good and noteworthy games here; Lost Odyssey, Vanquish, Eternal Sonata and so on.
Now, if the Xbox One has back compatibility all of a sudden, that means that we have at least a temporary stay-of-execution on all three of those games I just mentioned. Plus the fact that they're running on PC-like hardware keeps alive the prospect that we might see them running on "proper" PC hardware at some point further down the line. And if you care about preserving an unbroken history of gaming's development, then this matters. If you don't think that keeping that chain intact matters, then just ask the BBC how they feel about all of those Doctor Who episodes they threw into the trash.
Of course, we still have some PS3 exclusives that are essentially marooned; and that Cell architecture is going to render any kind of emulation, whether on general PCs or on current or future Sony console hardware, a bitch. That leaves some excellent games (the PS3-era Ratchet & Clank games were superb and a lot of Japan's output for the latter half of the last console cycle was PS3-exclusive) still stranded. But maybe this step from MS will put some pressure on Sony.
Hopefully, the PC-like architecture of the current generation will make back-compatibility less of an issue going forward, though there are still issues about the extent to which many games are essentially dependent on PSN or XBL network architecture.