Jason Ronald, director of project management for Xbox, has discussed the failures of backwards compatibility and how it will now build games for the future.
Xbox released 70 new backwards compatible games this month as part of its 20th anniversary celebrations, but also disappointed fans when it announced this would be the last group of games from the Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One coming to the scheme.
On the Iron Lords Podcast, one of the senior members of the Xbox team, Jason Ronald, explained why Xbox can’t bring more old games to the current generation and how Xbox will look at making their games forward compatible in the future.
“Game preservation is in the DNA of team Xbox and I think the cloud is an interesting scenario because I was talking to somebody earlier this week and trust me, when someone is writing an Xbox 360 game or an OG Xbox game they were definitely not thinking that in 15, 20 years in the future this game is going to be running in a data centre being streamed down to a mobile device”
Ronald lamented that it has been impossible to bring every game to the Xbox Series X/S. “We have this great library, we have this great catalogue of games from our past and it’s really about how do we enable more people to play these games. – Not only do we want these games to be playable, we want them to be playable in more places and better than ever before.”
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He also spoke about how the company has taken this experience and its failure to reproduce its library, and transformed it into how it will develop for future consoles.
“I’ve had experiences in my past where we wanted to go rebuild a game from like ten years ago and we don’t even have those tools anymore. We want to go back and enhance them and remaster them, and I think as an industry we’ve definitely learned a lot and heard a lot from the community and a lot of the things the team have talked about is how do we build these games with an eye towards 10, 15, 20 years in the future. So there is a lot of opportunity here and the team has a lot of exciting things that they’re working on. ”
“There are just some games where we haven’t been able to overcome some of these hurdles, but we are trying to take those learning experiences as we think about the future.”
In other news, streamer Dr. Disrespect has broken his controller after getting frustrated at a perceived failure in Halo Infinite’s aim assist feature.