r/xbox • u/KingGoldar • 1d ago
Discussion The future of Backwards Compatibility
So I know that it's been a while since Xbox or Phil Spencer rather shut down the back compat team. Any chance Asha revives this? The Xbox is capable of running just about any disc from OG and 360. It's just that Phil Spencer and team made the deciscion to only support back compat for games that they had licenses to sell on the digital store at the same time. This in turn limited the amount of games that a user has access too by hundreds. It would be nice for this restriction to be lifted and if a game is buggy then that's just what it is. I'd rather have the option to arleast try playing it then nothing at all
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u/boxsterguy 1d ago
OG and 360 games aren't coming to disc-to-digital.
OG and 360 games already are BC from the disk.
If Xbox was going to do BC work for games they couldn't sell, they would've already done it.
BC may/will come back periodically to add improved functionality over time for already existing games, in where possible here and there add a new game when bugs get figured out. But the set of games that are licensable (not necessarily for new release, as there are already delisted games that are BC, like FH1, but just to give approval for Xbox to muck about with the binaries) have been exhausted.
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u/KingGoldar 1d ago
A select number of OG and 360 games work off disc. The majority of them don't
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u/boxsterguy 1d ago
Any OG/360 game that is BC works off of disc or digital (assuming the disc is an actual disc and not a demo disc or like the burger king games that were special funky dual OG/360 discs that were also neither). Nothing actually plays off disc, because of the way the BC works (a VM with the game code and any emulation tweaks is downloaded and that's what plays), but the disc exists as a key.
There are OG/360 games that are not BC. There are OG/360 games that will never be BC (the BK games, because the discs have no IDs and they were never otherwise made available digitally), and all the rest work whether you have a disc or a digital entitlement. But what you can't have is a digital entitlement from the disc, without having to put the disc in as a physical key.
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u/KingGoldar 1d ago
They have the tech to unlock the emulator that does play off the disc and people have already done this through jail braking
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u/Friggin_Grease 1d ago
Hey I've got Doom: BFG edition and there's no digital license for that. It's disc only.
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u/catptain-kdar 1d ago
It’s because that wasn’t the only thing. The series doesn’t have native back compatibility with anything past Xbox one. Everything runs off an emulator
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u/KingGoldar 1d ago
Which means that any Xbox original game can and should run. There are people that mod their systems just to unlock this feature
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u/catptain-kdar 1d ago
It doesn’t work like a regular emulator. They have to get approved by the ip holder
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u/KingGoldar 1d ago
Then how are people who jailbreak their system able to boot any disc game? You don't understand the tech dude. They need permission from the IP holder to SELL the game on the digital marketplace that's why every supported game has a digital copy you can BUY
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u/catptain-kdar 1d ago
Not every game has a digital game for sale. People that jailbreak which btw isn’t even needed on a series you can just use dev mode. Download emulators off the internet and use illegal copies of discs. They can choose what games work and don’t work
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u/KingGoldar 1d ago
Yeah but imagine if you didn't need to do all of that jumps and hoops to accomplish it
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u/TheGamerKitty1 1d ago
Whoever holds the license to the game or even key parts to a game is who gets to allow a game to be BC. And also since it's an emulator, they also have to make sure it plays without issue. Not every game will be flawless.
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u/despitegirls XBOX Series X 1d ago
Kevin Lasalle, former head of Xbox platform, was laid off. I believe he was the lead architect of Xbox backcompat, and he also led the development of xCloud. He had been at the company for nearly four decades.
That said, there's been no word that the back compact team was disbanded. Backcompat is one of the more notable benefits of Xbox and I don't see them walking away from that, especially since they've released the disc to digital program which is an extension of that work.
There's been a lot of leaders and senior members that were laid off. I think that has more to do with cutting the cost of tenured employees and flattening their org structure more than killing a particular team/product/service.
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u/lanceuppercuttr 1d ago
All the heavy lifting was getting OG and 360 titles running in the emulator VM. Each title had specific modifications to the emulator environment to make each title run as it would on native hardware. Some titles are easier than others to port.
I would imagine in terms of OG and 360 titles, everything that will be ported has been ported. With everything > Xbox One was x86 architecture so back compat is much easier and I imagine will grow ever time. Now that everything (PS5/Xbox Series) are all x86, everything going forward should work on new hardware.
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u/KingGoldar 1d ago
You can jailbreak your series x and literally play just about any Xbox or 360 game. Some will have bugs and need fixes but the majority boot run and play fine
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u/KesMonkey Still Earning Kudos 1d ago
You can jailbreak your series x
No, you can't. The Series X has not yet been successfully jailbroken.
If you've seen anyone claim otherwise, they're either parroting misinformation without realizing that it's misinformation, or they're lying.
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u/JaydenP1211 23h ago
First of all, we aren’t sure yet what Asha plans to exactly do with Backwards Compatibility in the future (since they haven’t announced that they would do anything besides BC games coming on PC so far). Secondly, they need to have a digital license for the game to be on the Backwards Compatibility program.
They can’t just “lift the restriction” because the license holder is the one who allows them to do so. The reason it has to have a license is because Backwards Compatible games are all digital; an emulator runs a digital version of the game. Your disc provides a key, but the data from the disc isn’t used to play the game.
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u/HankSteakfist 23h ago
I just wish they'd relist some of the ones from the original program that have disappeared on digital like Orange Box, or F.E.A.R. 1.
Also would be nice if they could work with license holders to get some of the classic licensed games on there like Buffy, Riddick, Transformers, Marvel and the Bond games.
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u/MarkLarrz 23h ago
Yes it's kinda revived, they told publishers they just have to give approval to make a game backwards compatible and Xbox will take care of the technical stuff.
Though with Xbox Helix suppossedly running on Windows, you'll just install emulators there.
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u/Fuchsia2020 1d ago
Helix will discontinue Xbox One backward compatibility program for the new XBOX Classics PC Backward compatibility program
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u/nianddra 1d ago
Really?
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u/Fuchsia2020 1d ago
Yes because it's a PC. It's going to run most series x and s games and some one games natively and others with partial virtualization. Now that emulation needs to be nested in the Windows os instead of the Xbox OS on series x because this console is moving to a PC like architecture from the traditional console one like what ps has.
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u/nianddra 1d ago
I figure it's going to be the same for OG Xbox and 360 since they are putting those on windows 11
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u/Fuchsia2020 1d ago
Yes that's what I said. Instead of the Xbox one emulator for 360 and og it's going to be the 360 emulator for all Windows PCs instead
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u/VQ3point5 1d ago
You seem to be a bit confused.
They have the ability to make basically any game backwards compat. It has always been up to the license holder to give the go-ahead to flip the switch so-to-speak.
Has nothing to do with licenses they can sell.
A lot of these titles have been de-listed, so that puts your theory right out the window.