Currently, the Xbox One backward compatibility program lets you to play about 454 Xbox 360 titles. In June of this year, a study determined that the platform’s users had little interest in this bookstore. Without wasting time, Xbox executives offered some statistics to prove the opposite.
During the Brazil Game Show, Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, spoke again on the subject. The executive assured that the numbers do not lie and that they know with certainty that users of Xbox One are playing the backward compatible titles. Thus, any attempt to demean the program has no justification whatsoever.
“It’s not true that people don’t play it. I’ve seen those online arguments about nobody uses it or everybody uses it. It’s not true that everybody plays backwards compatibility games, it’s not true that no one does,” Spencer said to Gamespot. “A lot of the data is third party data so I can’t really tell you how many people are playing a certain game; it’s not my game. I think the best signal we had so far is when Black Ops II landed and that month it hit NPD’s Top 10 that month for game sales. An Xbox 360 game that’s years old, that shows that people care.”
“We continue to invest in back-compat because it matters. Not because somebody else [Sony] doesn’t have it. If somebody else did it tomorrow, we wouldn’t stop. We see it as a commitment to our customers that the games you buy from us [will work on new platforms],” added the executive.
Finally, Spencer added that he wants to avoid buying them on old platforms that become “useless” before the arrival of new consoles. For this reason, backward compatibility is of great importance and offers a great option for players to preserve their full library of titles acquired.
In related news, Spencer explained the importance of this function to preserve the history of video games. He also said that backward compatibility with Original Xbox will arrive this year.
What do you think about Microsoft’s strategy? Do you think backward compatibility is important?
