While the PlayStation has the big exclusives, the biggest selling points of Microsoft’s Xbox console are the Xbox Game Pass, backward compatibility and the company’s widely acclaimed live service for multiplayer titles.
Of these, backward compatibility is arguably the most important – Game Pass depends on it and is a great reason for people to stay with the same console – to ensure that their old game libraries still work.
However, 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 out of 997 games on the original Xbox console and 477 out of 2154 on the Xbox 360 are functional on Xbox One or the recently launched Xbox Series X.
In addition, only a few, specifically around three dozen or more and many of them themselves, have been ‘Enhanced’ to make use of current hardware. The list has not grown much in the few months since the new console was launched and recently the director of project management for the Xbox Series X, Jason Ronald, spoke about why.
Speaking to Lords of Gaming about the challenge of adding backward compatibility to older games, Ronald said he would love to add more games to the program, but now they are facing challenges that will slow down rather than speed up new additions:
“We want to bring more games to the program, but it is getting more and more difficult. First, technically, can we make some of these games work? However, more often than now, 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 it’s definitely a challenge.
I will definitely say that it is getting more difficult, [but] we would like to bring more games to the program. I cannot commit to any specific game or [confirm whether] we’ll 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’ve heard the feedback. “
Making games made before 2012 works can be difficult today, even with robust PCs, let alone consoles, due to software compatibility issues. Sometimes, emulators can solve this, but they usually have their own problems in the process and consume a lot of memory and CPU.
One solution that Microsoft has been employing is to build its systems that will be able to work on a variety of titles, regardless of the developer, such as Auto HDR and the recently launched FPS Boost. The latter, however, requires developers to work closely with Microsoft to release new updates. As such, it is only functional for five titles at the moment (“Far Cry 4” and “Watch Dogs 2” being the largest), but it should be expanded to a variety of titles in the coming months.
The guys at Digital Foundry looked at the five titles that got the FPS boost and seem quite impressed. Check out his analysis below: