The Untold Story of Xbox Backwards Compatibility

[Vandalsquad]

 

I know this article is a week old, and most have already read it. But for those who haven't and the discussion around it, just amazing the amount of titles and now original xbox titles where heading for now and where Microsoft are going with this. Great read and worth the 5 minutes.

 

 

Quote

“It was literally the proudest moment of my career,” La Chapelle told me, his face fighting back emotions at the mere recall of the story. “The room erupted. I teared up. It was perfect validation of all this effort.”

The fan-first feature has evolved from an experiment conducted by two separate Microsoft Research teams into a service planned for Xbox One’s launch – complete with hardware hooks baked into the Durango silicon – until the well-publicized changes to the Xbox One policies (namely, stripping out the always-online requirement for the console) forced it to be pushed to the back burner...

 

http://au.ign.com/articles/2017/10/23/the-untold-story-of-xbox-one-backwards-compatibility

[George P Global Moderator]

BC support is the key piece going forward, it allows you to upgrade the hardware and not have to worry about breaking up the library and forcing players to buy the new hardware right away.    It's the PC model brought over to consoles in the end.  The key after this is how often you update the hardware and how many versions do you try and support?  I think the best is to have a new hardware update around 4 years at the most, and to support the newest 2 models.   Right now that means the XB1 and the XB1X, when they release the next system they'll finally drop the original XB1 and only need to have developers support the X and whatever the next one is.