Microsoft Explains Why Some Major Titles are Missing From Backwards Compatibility at Launch

12th November, 0 replies

When Microsoft revealed the initial list of backwards compatible games a number of fans pointed out that there were some notable omissions from the list.

Microsoft’s Group Program Manager Richard Irving has explained that it isn't as simple as just allowing a game to be backwards compatible; there are licensing issues behind every game that publishers have to go through to make sure it is okay for an Xbox 360 game to be playable on the Xbox One.

"After the technological breakthrough that got backwards compatibility working, the next step was to figure out how to license all this content, originally released on Xbox 360, for Xbox One," Irving told Eurogamer. "As you can imagine, publishers have cut very specific deals on some of that content. For example Madden - you can imagine how many licenses go into a game with the players, the NFL, sponsors and so on. And there's over 1000 games at this point on Xbox 360."

"It didn't seem fair to ask our partners to go off and find licenses for all this Xbox 360 content so what we opted to do instead was to give fans the opportunity to prioritise which games they want. So then we can re-engage with publishers and ask about specific games and say, 'please let us know if this is something you can do'. So it's really up to publishers to approve it."

"Publishers are super engaged and responsive to that stuff, the response was overwhelming from fans. It's just that some of the content takes longer than others to organise, so we weren't able to get all of the top 50 or 100 games, but we have a good number of them."

Microsoft is in talks with all of the publishers and developers that have released games on the Xbox 360, including Rockstar, and hopes to continuously expand the list of backwards compatible titles.

Source:

goo.gl/…

Around the Network

0 COMMENTS
Reply

Related Brainwaves

Trending Articles