Microsoft’s backward compatibility program could have come to an finish on November 20, 2021, with greater than 70 video games being added as a part of Xbox’s twentieth anniversary, however chances are you'll be questioning: "Why hasn’t myfavorite Xbox 360 or original Xbox game made the cut?"Throughout the lifetime of the Xbox backward compatibility program, individuals have at all times questioned why more titles have not been added. Jason Ronald, director of program administration at Xbox, defined to TRG that making a game again-compat wasn't as simple as individuals may assume. “A lot of the games in the original Xbox generation or the Xbox 360 generation, at that time, the idea of forward compatibility – and thinking about how these games will live on – was not part of the DNA of the industry,” says Ronald.“There could be titles that we'd be working on, and we'd get them technically working. But then unexpectedly, we’d notice all of the totally different approvals that we would wish: whether or not it is a writer or developer or a license holder.“And that actually created a lot of work and a lot of challenges,” Ronald goes on to elucidate. “In some circumstances, when you consider the consolidation of corporations, or IP being bought, generally it is even tough to determine who you want approval from!“But I will say every game is a unique challenge. And that’s one of the harder things to get across to the community. Because people are like, ‘Oh, well, you did this game, you should do that game’. Every game is a unique set of challenges and that's where a lot of the work goes behind actually bringing a game forward.”
So many video games, so many hurdles
(Image credit score: Microsoft)Issues with licenses, publishers, and technical quirks imply that there are a whole lot of video games that Microsoft wished so as to add to the Xbox backward compatibility program, however merely could not. Some titles, as Ronald shares, have taken years to be added to this system because of the aforementioned points.“When we started this last patch [over 70 back-compat titles were added on November 20, 2021], we actually started with a list of hundreds of games that we were going to go try,” says Ronald. “And we did not know if we had been going to get 5 [titles], if we had been going to get 10 [titles], or if we will get 20 [titles].“And to be honest, there are some games in the program that I just never thought we would be able to bring forward. It’s a labor of love and it takes, in some cases, years to be able to bring these forward, but the team has always been really committed to doing everything we can for the fans.”So there you've got it. There’s various causes why sure older titles like Blur, Stranglehold, and Project Gotham Racing 4 aren’t backward compatible on Xbox Series X – and it is not for need of making an attempt.
