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While PlayStation has the big exclusives, the biggest selling points for Microsoft’s Xbox console are Xbox Game Pass, backward compatibility, and the company’s widely acclaimed live service for multiplayer titles.
Of those, backward compatibility is arguably the most important – Game Pass builds on it and is one of the main reasons people stick with the same console, to make sure their old game libraries keep working. .
However, even with a strong backward compatibility program, only a few older generation games still work. According to Microsoft’s website, only 38 of the 997 games on the original Xbox console and 477 of the 2,154 games on the Xbox 360 are functional on the recently released Xbox One or Xbox Series X.
On top of that only a few, specifically around three dozen and many of them first-party, have been ‘Enhanced’ to make use of current hardware. The list hasn’t grown much in the few months since the new console came out, and recently Xbox Series X director of project management Jason Ronald spoke about why.
Speaking to Lords of Gaming about the challenge of adding backward compatibility for older games, Ronald says he would love to add more games to the show, but now they face challenges that will slow down rather than speed up new inclusions:
“We want to bring more games to the program, but it is getting more and more difficult. First of all, technically, can we get some of these games to work? But more often than that now it is, in some cases these developers or publishers don’t even exist anymore. Either there are license agreements, or maybe a developer has plans for the franchise, so it’s definitely a challenge.
I’ll definitely say it’s getting harder [but] we would like to bring more games to the program. I cannot commit to any specific game 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 listened to feedback. “
Getting games created before 2012 or so to work can be difficult these days, even with sturdy PCs and much less consoles, due to software compatibility issues. Emulators can sometimes solve this, but they often have their own problems in the process and are famous for their high memory and CPU usage.
One solution Microsoft has been employing has been building its systems that will be able to work on a variety of titles, regardless of developer, such as the recently released Auto HDR and FPS Boost. However, the latter requires developers to work together with Microsoft to implement the new updates. As such, it is only functional for five titles currently (“Far Cry 4” and “Watch Dogs 2” are the largest), but it is expected to expand to a variety of titles in the coming months.
The guys at Digital Foundry have looked at the five titles that got the FPS boost and they seem quite impressed. See their analysis below:
