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While PlayStation has the big exclusives, the main selling points for Microsoft’s Xbox console are Xbox Game Pass, backward compatibility, and the company’s widely acclaimed live service for multiplayer titles.
Backward compatibility is arguably the most important – Game Pass depends on it and that’s a big reason people stick to the same console – to make sure their libraries of older games are still working.
Yet even with a robust backward compatibility program, only a few games beyond the previous generation still work. According to Microsoft’s own website, only 38 of the original Xbox console’s 997 games and 477 of the Xbox 360’s 2154 are functional on the recently released Xbox One or Xbox Series X.
On top of that, only a few, especially around 30 dozen and many of them first-party, have been “ upgraded ” to use current hardware. The list hasn’t grown much in the few months since the new console’s release and recently, Xbox Series X Project Management Director Jason Ronald explained why.
Speaking with Lords of Gaming about the challenge of adding backward compatibility for older games, Ronald says he would like to add more games to the schedule, but now they face challenges that will slow down rather than speed up new ones. inclusions:
“We want to add more games to the program, but it’s getting more and more difficult. First of all, technically, can we get some of these games to work? But more often than not, in some cases, these developers or publishers don’t even exist anymore. Or, there are licensing agreements, or maybe a developer has plans for the franchise, so that’s definitely a challenge.
I’ll definitely say it’s getting harder and harder [but] we would like to add more games to the program. I cannot engage in specific games or [confirm whether] we’re going to be able to add more games in the future, but it’s definitely something we’re working on, we’re trying to do what we can, but I’ll definitely say we’re hearing the feedback.
Running games prior to around 2012 can be difficult these days, even with rugged PCs let alone consoles, due to software compatibility issues. Emulators can sometimes fix this problem, but they often have their own issues in the process and consume a lot of memory and CPU.
One solution employed by Microsoft has been building their systems capable of running on a range of titles, regardless of developer, like Auto HDR and the recently released FPS Boost. The latter, however, requires developers to work alongside Microsoft to deploy the new updates. As such, it’s currently only functional for five titles (“Far Cry 4” and “Watch Dogs 2” being the biggest), but is expected to expand to a range of titles in the coming months.
The guys at Digital Foundry have reviewed all five titles that got the FPS boost and seem pretty impressed. Check out their analysis below:
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