Backwards compatibility has been a bit of a selling point for the Xbox since 2015. Besides the phenomenal work put into getting XBox original and 360 titles working on Fission—Microsoft’s console emulator—Xbox has made those old games ‘cool’ in a world that continues to argue that no one plays old games. Now up to this point, Microsoft would talk about backwards compatibility on the Series X and S being in the ‘thousands of available games’, which while nice is not the kind of 100 percent confirmation we would like to see.
But earlier today, Jason Ronald, Director of Project Management at Xbox, had some news to share on the topic:
This is great news. Any games currently playable on Xbox One that are not Kinect-only games (sorry, Dance Central and Fighter Within) will work on Xbox Series X and S. This includes currently backwards compatible Xbox 360 and XBox original titles as well. You can move up ahead to the fancy new consoles and the vast majority of your games will not only work just fine, but will play better than they did on these aging Jaguar-based machines.
It is the end of an era for the Kinect. The first iteration gave the Xbox 360 a boost into the second half of its life, and I cannot say I blame Microsoft for placing all their eggs into Kinect 2.0 for the Xbox One, even if it was a bad idea in hindsight. Ah well, the sad part about all this is that anyone getting into D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die is going to be playing the game with a controller—now that is a shame.
