OK, you win. Microsoft will dedicate 30 minutes of the intro to Scarlet talking about how forwards compatibility works, and they will require huge disclaimers on the box to make sure that this theoretical idiot who doesn’t get it understands that the images and videos he’s seen are for the Scarlet version, and the XBONE version will not look as good.
We’ve done this before. I remember launching LEGO Star Wars II on PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Gamecube, DS, and PSP. We only ever showed screenshots for the Xbox 360 version.
It wasn’t an issue that the PS2 version didn’t look as good.
So far we only have the codename, Scarlet. If it’s marketed as Xbox One R or whatever, that means they’re doing right by their customers and maintaining forwards compatibility. If it’s the Xbox Testiculata, they might be trying to position as a separate generation and purposefully breaking forwards compatibility. That would be a shame.
When you want to sell consoles, you have to make sure people want to play on the new hardware and not the old, otherwise the point of the new console is lost to them and sales suffer.
They will allow backwards compatibility, but when the next box ships you won’t be playing its games on the old machine save some of the crossover end of gen stuff that started development on the other older boxes. The branding will change.
That’s what I meant at the end there. They’ll still sell previous and current gen SKUs for awhile, but Ones will be put out to pasture after the new machine ships. You have to, or you’re just not going to convince people to upgrade in a timely manner. Suddenly you’re number two again because your competition made a clean break…
Look at PS4. It has ZERO backwards compatibility. You have to rebuy your old games IF they make them available on PS4. They’re in a completely different timeline from Microsoft on this and Microsoft has built up backwards compatibility and Game Pass because they have a lack of new exclusive content. They NEED their past. Sony only needs it to provide fodder for sequels and remakes.
I’m confused. Are you talking hardware or software?
I agree that Microsoft will stop selling XBONE hardware some number of months after they start selling Scarlet.
But EA will continue to make Madden for XBONE for as long as the installed base makes sense. Forward compatability means that could be for years, or forever.
Like me, you’re getting backward and forward compatibility confused.
This paragraph is about backwards compatibility. That means your XBONE games play on Scarlet. This will probably be trivial because the architecture will be the same.
Forward compatibility means your Scarlet games play on XBONE. Or really just that there aren’t Scarlet or XBONE games at all, just Xbox games. They look way better and can play at 4K/60hz with HDR and all kinds of fancy other things on Scarlet. But you put that disc in your XBONE and you get what would have been the separate XBONE SKU.
I’m talking about what stusser was on about. I fully expect it to be backwards compatible with Xbox One. No way they sell games in the next gen that have One and One X versions on the same disc IMO.
Don’t forget too that the reason we have this hardware race is partially because developers love it. They want more everything all the time and bitch and moan if they have to work on “old” tech. That’s why they all turned their noses up at Nintendo publically in the Wii era. It’s still true today.
There are no “versions”, any more than there are multiple versions of Crysis. If you have a slow computer, Crysis runs at reduced quality and framerate. If you have a fast computer, it looks better and runs faster.
Advantage of current-gen consoles is rather than targeting thousands of different hardware configurations, you get to target and tune for a couple. XBone, XBone X, and soon XBone R (or whatever they call it). There is no technical reason to break forwards compatibility on what is essentially a standard PC platform. If they do it, they’re doing it for sales reasons.
And they might yet, you could be right. I just hope you aren’t.
In a way that makes sense, and I like the possibilities. Xbox seems to be getting away from being tied down to a single platform. But it’s a pretty big jump, even if only in people’s heads. It was mentioned upthread that LEGO Star Wars existed for different platforms, but those were also separate SKUs, nobody thought you could take a 360 disc and pop it into a PS2 and play a downgraded version. But if that’s what we’re looking at, it’s going to take some getting used to. I could see people putting a PS5 disc into their Scarlet - what’s the difference, they’re all hardware!
And just so I’m clear, I am not attributing this to stupidity, just that lots of folks don’t think this stuff through, nor do they read the fine print. Sometimes I do Xbox Ambassador work and some of the questions I see are really basic.
MS doesn’t make money selling hardware. What the hell do they care whether you play Dead or Alive VII on a XBoneS or XBoneR? They release new hardware to remain relevant and competitive.
There is if you want anything other than graphics upgrades. I imagine “hey the new console has all these extra powerful CPUs, but you can’t use them because then it won’t work on Xbox One Original” is going to go over great with the gameplay and AI programmers.
Few people know that and fewer still want to admit it. You and I know that the PS4 and Xbox One are much more alike than they are different under the hood. Most people have no clue that’s the case.
Also, they’re selling hardware because they get a cut of every game sold when it’s sold for their box. That’s why they have the Windows Store now too. They want you to be paying them every single time you play some game on machines they are running on.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like you think I’m arguing that XBone games will run on PS4 because they’re both AMD CPUs and GPUs. I never said or implied such a thing.
And yes, exactly, they care about selling games for their platform. That’s what matters.
@Mysterial: There’s a difference between “the hardware can’t do it” and “we are purposefully breaking compatibility”. Of course if a new game can’t run on an older console for technical reasons, that should be permitted.
