Xbox has been hard at work to put in backwards-compatible support for Xbox 360 games to Xbox One. That work has been quiet, for good reason. The team were working to ensure that the new next-gen Xbox, which comprised of the Xbox Series X and possibly more, will all be backwards compatible.
Microsoft’s VP of gaming and face of Xbox Phil Spencer confirms this through an interview with Gamespot. “We wanted to make sure we had that, day one, we could deliver on the compatibility promise, and so I’ve been playing quite a few [Xbox 360] games on my [Xbox Series X] and Xbox One games on the [Xbox Series X] and that’s just to ensure that we can be there day one,” he said.
This goes in line with Spencer’s tweet early this month, where he has been using the console, still codenamed Project Scarlett back then.
And it’s started….this week I brought my Project Scarlett console home and it's become my primary console, playing my games, connecting to the community and yes, using my Elite Series 2 controller, having a blast. Great work by the team, 2020 is going to be an incredible year.
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) December 4, 2019
The Xbox One was designed to have back-compat in mind, but that does not mean the work to get those games were easy.
“[It takes a lot of work] even for Xbox One games, because one of the biggest challenges is console games are usually hyper-optimized to the unique hardware capabilities of the device, and this is a new generation of hardware,” Xbox partner director of program management Jason Ronald said in the same interview.
“It is a new chip architecture. At the same time, we did design the silicon with [backwards] compatibility in mind, so we did make certain decisions to try to lessen that work, but I don’t want to trivialize how much work the team’s actually doing because there is a tremendous amount of work.”
In addition, all your Gamerscore, achievements, friends list and game saves will all carry over to the next-gen Xbox.
The Xbox Series X will be out in Holiday 2020. So will the PS5.
Source: Gamespot