Major Nelson Talks Challenges Of Xbox One Backwards Compatibility

We all have our requests for Xbox 360 games to eventually be Xbox One backwards compatible. However, what we don’t know is how difficult it can be.

Major Nelson along with Bill Stillwell talked about the many challenges of Xbox One backwards compatibility during the latest podcast. Reddit user, SpartanRanger summarized some of the best bits.

Some of the challenges of making Xbox 360 games playable on Xbox One is testing if everything works. The emulator might not be able to replicate gameplay accurately which is why games have to be tested multiple times from beginning to end.

One thing they discussed was when they were testing out Forza Horizon. The game was mostly working well, but there was no collision detection. Therefore they had to fix it so that you weren’t able to drive through other cars and the environment.

Another big challenge is going through licensing. This includes who own the rights to older IP and even in-game music. They have to contact who currently owns the rights to older games to get permission to make games backwards compatible.

Lastly, they also have to test out different versions of games. There may be GOTY editions and other versions released. If a game is released, they re-test it on Xbox One to make sure all bugs are fixed.

Finally they said there are over 1800 Xbox 360 games that have been released so far. Roughly over 280 of them are now backwards compatible. 300 backwards compatible games is their goal for the end of 2016.