*spin-off* Importance of Backward Compatibility Discussion

[function]

Didn't some IBM guy accidentally let slip that they had the next gen Sony and Nintendo contracts last year?

It'd be quite surprising if MS didn't go with them too. Backwards compatibility is a different proposition if your games are no longer physical copies able to run on any hardware unit ever made, and instead tied to a user account that migrates to a new hardware platform. You still probably wouldn't play 90% of your old games ever again anyway, but the thought of effectively binning your entire catalog of downloaded games just because you want the next gen system would be quite the turn off for a lot of folks.

 

[AlNom]

Emulating the CPU function isn't much of an issue, especially Xenon's rather mundane design.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

...but the thought of effectively binning your entire catalog of downloaded games just because you want the next gen system would be quite the turn off for a lot of folks.

I don't understand where this thinking comes from. We have done this time and again as technology becomes obsolete. 8-track, records, tapes, C64 disks, NES carts, PC floppies, etc. are all dead and buried, and no-one's particularly crying over that loss. There's maybe one title I'd like to revisit from last gen, because a decent next-gen alternative hasn't been released yet, and a couple of a games that'd be worth a remake. Otherwise I'm past it. Hell, most of the download games I've bought this gen I'm done with on the hardware I've already played them on, because I've finished them. AFAIK most games people buy don't get played to completion anyway. If people aren't even interested enough in getting their full monies worth of games by actually completing them, why will they miss BC next-gen? I think BC is the Emperor's New Clothes of console design myself.

 

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I don't understand where this thinking comes from. We have done this time and again as technology becomes obsolete. 8-track, records, tapes, C64 disks, NES carts, PC floppies, etc. are all dead and buried, and no-one's particularly crying over that loss. There's maybe one title I'd like to revisit from last gen, because a decent next-gen alternative hasn't been released yet, and a couple of a games that'd be worth a remake. Otherwise I'm past it. Hell, most of the download games I've bought this gen I'm done with on the hardware I've already played them on, because I've finished them. AFAIK most games people buy don't get played to completion anyway. If people aren't even interested enough in getting their full monies worth of games by actually completing them, why will they miss BC next-gen? I think BC is the Emperor's New Clothes of console design myself.

There's a distinct difference between things sliding into obsolescence, and on Day One of buying your new system binning every game you have for that platform. Not even selling them (even for a pittance at the local trade-in store) just seeing them scattered to digital oblivion.

With physical media you can sell your old stuff or even give it away. Or keep the old system and the games and get it out when you want it (maybe never). Backwards compatibility isn't such as issue. You often hear "I don't need B/C because my old systems still work fine" and that's a perfectly sound line of reasoning. But just throwing everything away? I think that's different, and a psychological barrier especially when you're supposed to be transferring form one highly active platform to a new one. Early momentum is hugely important in the console wars.

With the 360 you had to transfer your Live account from the Xbox 1, rendering your Xbox 1 Live stuff dead ... or it would have, without B/C. Halo 2 was the most played Live game even on the 360 in the early days - without it "upgrading" to the 360 would have been a step many early adopters would have thought twice about.

Steam wouldn't fare so well if you had to start your game collection from scratch every time you built a new PC, and unless a Live account gains the ability to span multiple generations of Xbox simultaneously (not impossible) I think MS will be keen to give Live members a feeling of continuity with their DL games and content.

 

[swaaye]

Yeah backwards compatibility came out of nowhere with PS2 and now a lot of people demand it. It certainly is a boat anchor though, adding either extra hardware or costly emulator development. It may also prevent significant changes in architecture. In Wii's case it may have been a big factor in the gimpy hardware aspect. I'd really rather not pay for a new machine that has a lot of an old machine in it too...(again)

 

[AlNom]

I would think BC is only really important for cross-generational purposes. Halo 2 is kind of a unique situation, having only been on the market for about a year by the time Xbox 360 came. It really just fills the vacuum of gaming at the launch, but the other great advantage is bringing along the online community, which I think will be pretty important for the next transition. That is, how does Microsoft ease the transition period and incentivize current players to make the switch as well as not make your Purchase/Download History not obsolete?

If we look at the current top 10 or top 20, it's pretty much filled with the Halo and Call of Duty games, the latter of which are not what I would say are the most technologically challenging for a BC scenario.

Xbox 360 Top LIVE Titles (based on UU’s)
1 Call of Duty: Black Ops
2 Modern Warfare 2
3 Halo: Reach
4 FIFA Soccer 11
5 NBA 2K11
6 GTA IV
7 Mortal Kombat
8 Battlefield: Bad Co. 2
9 Call of Duty 4
10 Red Dead Redemption
11 Halo 3
12 Gears of War 2
13 Portal 2
14 Call of Duty: WaW
15 NHL 11
16 Forza Motorsport 3
17 Madden NFL 11
18 Bulletstorm
19 Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
20 Fallout: New Vegas

Four Call of Duty games, the two larger Halo games, Gears, Battlefield... MS would be remiss if they didn't have a BC solution in the works already - it would at least be pretty poor for Games on Demand titles not to be, IMO (aside from XBLA, but if they can't get BC working for those, then I'd be really worried).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

With the 360 you had to transfer your Live account from the Xbox 1, rendering your Xbox 1 Live stuff dead ... or it would have, without B/C. Halo 2 was the most played Live game even on the 360 in the early days - without it "upgrading" to the 360 would have been a step many early adopters would have thought twice about.

Halo is a serious fringe case, being a popular online title still active when XB360 was release. Had Halo 3 been out on 360's release, H2 wouldn't have had a look in. Had an alternative next-gen online game with the same pulling power been released, Halo 2 players would have moved on (as they have I suppose with COD and other Halo titles). Had H2 not worked on 360, those 360 buyers would have just waited a while.

Steam wouldn't fare so well if you had to start your game collection from scratch every time you built a new PC

PC is different as it's an evolutionary platform built on a hardware abstraction layer. But even then, old software and devices have stopped working and buyers of new computers have had to face replacing their old software and hardware.

BC is nice, don't get me wrong, and it helps with the transition. But if you are tying your new hardware design to legacy hardware, you are tying a ball-and-chain around your engineers. The net fiscal gain is, IMO, way, way less than the potential costs in choosing a less-than-ideal hardware to accommodate BC. PS3, for example, needed costly BC hardware. And that was a good call - if Sony had stuck a next-gen GS in there instead of RSX, PS3 would have been a dire architecture! MS didn't design any hardware BC as far as we know (costly licensing issues), but thanks to XB running on a hardware abstraction layer in the main, MS were able to port titles and offer a degree of BC. Had they stuck with full BC, they'd have had to buy an x86 processor at no doubt considerably higher cost than Xenon, and gone with an nVidia without unified shaders or licensed the necessaries. If Nintendo want to keep GC and Wii BC, they'll be utterly gimping their graphics, or including redundant hardware that, once the NES6 game library has fleshed out, will not be used. That's wasted money.

Seeing your old games as not working on new hardware is something I think everyone can take in their stride. And things like XNA titles will no doubt be portable anyway without having to design that explicitly in the hardware. If I were in charge of a new console engineering project, I'd tell my engineers to ignore previous hardwares completely, and design the very best bang-for-buck with modern hardware that they can.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Four Call of Duty games, the two larger Halo games, Gears, Battlefield... MS would be remiss if they didn't have a BC solution in the works already - it would at least be pretty poor for Games on Demand titles not to be, IMO (aside from XBLA, but if they can't get BC working for those, then I'd be really worried).

How's about instead investing that money on a COD exclusive ready at launch for their new console?

 

[AlNom]

Indeed, especially given what we've heard of devs avoiding low-level on 360, it'd almost seem a repeat situation as Xbox<->360. The software guys will handle the BC for the most important titles to carry forward, but the hardware should be pushing forward not worrying about legacy.

How's about instead investing that money on a COD exclusive ready at launch for their new console?

I suppose with the yearly output, that would work pretty well ( I take it you mean making a deal that lets Activision pay less royalty?). The other thing is that Activision would likely want people onto the next iteration asap, so they might nix the idea of BC? then again, it's not like the Xbox 1 list was only the high profile titles. It sort of just worked for a lot of games from not coding down to the metal.

 

[-tkf-]

BC doesn´t help with the seemingly new approach of "remixing" old games with HiRes version.

God of war 1+2 might have been a harder sale if all PS3´s could play and upscale the original games.

I for one would like to see Vice City and San Andreas "remixed", i popped in San Andreas the other day.. and... well, it looks bad compared to the new stuff

 

[Trejser]

Any chance for PS3 BC in PS4 without Cell? GPU can be probably emulated, but SPU's?

 

[Nesh]

There is a difference between the Backwards Compatibility we were getting back in the PS2 era and the Backwards Compatibility of DD games we would like to see carried over to the next console.

A great deal of games bought through PSN or Live are similar in mentality to the games we buy for our mobile devices like the iPhone. They are simple games, classic gameplay mechanics revisited, old games remade and in some cases the exact same old games rereleased. They arent necessarily attached to the generation of the console they were released on and so they dont get easily old and we would like to be able to buy and/or play them regardless of generation.

Also there is a physical difference. Whereas we used to own the games we bought on physical mediums, the nature of DD content means that by the time that we move on to the next console, and these games seize to exist in an online service to redownload, its like losing the content we own and paid for
For the mean time as long as I can redownload the stuff I bought I am not worried to delete it from my hardware to make space. It is still mine to download.
And my old games (edit: referring to old games available on physical form) I can store them or resell them and if I need some retro gaming I can find them and repurchase them from someone else.
The DD content can not be found (edit:cannot be resold or be bought) when they seize to exist in the online service
if the DD is BC compatible with the next gen console they will still be available

BC may not seem like much of a problem on old physical medium based games. But for DD it becomes one

 

[Svensk Viking]

I just feel that with digital distribution becoming bigger and bigger, I want them all to be transferable and playable on the new console...If I bought many games 360 from Games on demand and they won't be supported next gen, it would be a serious nail in the coffin for me

I also don't like digital distribution being dependant so much on Live...I mean, I have to make a license transfer every time the 360 breaks, and if Live is killed for the 360(as it was for the Xbox 1 not too long ago), all downladed content would be useless if I couldn't transfer them to the Xbox 3

 

[Deleted member 13524]

So here's my opinion on backwards-compatibility in consoles:



It's not important.



Done.

 

[TheD]

If Nintendo want to keep GC and Wii BC, they'll be utterly gimping their graphics, or including redundant hardware that, once the NES6 game library has fleshed out, will not be used. That's wasted money.

The next gen Nintendo system as long as it is not behind the curve will be powerful enough to emulate Wii and Gamecube games without any old hardware.

The PC Dolphin emulator shows just how easy it is to emulate them.

 

[swaaye]

Dolphin demands the absolute fastest CPU for even some Cube games. Although it is likely that skillful emulator professionals with access to all hardware docs could do it much better. Still, both PS3 and 360 have shown that pure software emulation is not trivial.

 

[AzBat]

It's not backward compatible, it's FORWARD compatible. You guys can say it's not necessary, but in the public's mind it will be. Just remember you guys are on the bleeding edge. Most of the millions of owners are not.

Tommy McClain

 

[Acert93]

#1 reason why MS will have some sort of BC plan: XBLA.

That is the #1 hook for an upgrade path. Telling people they can carry over ALL their XBLA and Indie games, day 1, to a new platform hooks them into the platform. If MS doesn't do this I am just as likely to get a competing system. But if the Xbox3 supports all my stuff that is a huge selling point.

 

[swaaye]

It's not backward compatible, it's FORWARD compatible. You guys can say it's not necessary, but in the public's mind it will be. Just remember you guys are on the bleeding edge. Most of the millions of owners are not.

Tommy McClain

Hey I don't even have a modern console unless you count Xbox as one. And when I'm not here causing strife, I'm usually over at VOGONS.

But I did have a Wii for a few years and thought I'd play my old Cube games that I used to have, but in the end I probably spent a total of an hour doing that. Hell now I can just play them in Dolphin on PC if I feel the burning need (which hasn't happened).

#1 reason why MS will have some sort of BC plan: XBLA.

Good point.

 

[AzBat]

Hey I don't even have a modern console unless you count Xbox as one. And when I'm not here causing strife, I'm usually over at VOGONS.

But I did have a Wii for a few years and thought I'd play my old Cube games that I used to have, but in the end I probably spent a total of an hour doing that. Hell now I can just play them in Dolphin on PC if I feel the burning need (which hasn't happened).

I'll agree that in practice most backward compatibility goes unused, but like Joshua & others have mentioned things are a little different now with digital content & people are going to be basing current buying strategy on whether or not their investment will carry forward. People want that security even though they are likely not to take full advantage it. If that content doesn't carry forward I think the general public will cry fowl & I most certainly would be one of them.

Tommy McClain