Supporting low-level BC in hardware is never going to be cheap. Take PS3 for example - emulating Cell on anything will be an absolute bugger, so hardware BC is going to either need a Cell in there, or a very customised part. Even emulating titles with a general emulator and per-title parameters isn't worth the returns, as evidenced by MS abandoning that and Sony never even trying it. The returns for BC could be anywhere, but the costs will certainly be substantial.
I don't think MS ever intended to support the whole Xbox catalog, and the costs of developing the emulator would have been small compared to the cost of developing custom BC hardware and then including it in every Xbox. The benefit of developing the emulator could have been tens or hundreds of millions or (at a stretch) billions of dollars in the long run.
I think you're right about Cell - Sony have a big issue and I don't know what they'll do. With MS the issue of BC is bigger though, because Live brings in over half a billion dollars of revenue every year in Gold subscriptions alone. Anything you can do to stop people defecting to your competitors
free service is worth a significant sum of money. With friends lists being what they are, any person that defects makes it easier for others to defect. And the early adopters will set the trend for everyone else.
It's also debatable if the majority see download titles as services or products. If they buy a game, finish it, and never return to it, then it's hardly a service providing you access to content you bought many moons ago and want to revisit after the fact. Putting it another way, what is the lifetime of a bought medium like a disc or tape? Should someone buying a movie or game in whatever format expect the creators/platform to support it for 1 year, 5, 50? What is the same lifetime of the same product bought as a download, and if different, why?
To use the tape analogy, I don't know anyone that threw out their entire VHS collection the day they bought a DVD player, or anyone that threw out all their DVDs when they went HD-DVD (oops) or BluRay. And while I can't prove it, I don't think any of the people I know would have upgraded if they'd had to do this. And yes, I know the situation with games isn't directly comparable, but overlap is important.
Half of the games I have on Steam I've never actually played. I'm sure there are people that have "jumped in" on Xbox Live marketplace specials and not yet played the games or not yet played them to their satisfaction or who simply don't like the idea of them or anyone else never playing the game they've bought and kept again.
And again, the point that doesn't seem to get mentioned is that owners of the new system may still want to play a game in co-op or in a Live party with their last gen friends. In the critical early adopter first 18 month phase this is more likely than at any other time, and given that the 360 isn't going to be aborted like the Xbox 1 (it's still selling and still making lots of money) a period of transition is more likely than ever.
Live is
hugely important to MS, and I don't think folks really get this yet.
We have personal testimony of the different perceptions, but a few opinions on a forum are nothing for a company to base their decisions on. What larger datasets do we have for consideration? I think things like Achievements/Trophies show how many people complete a game to its natural first-play conclusion, and I believe looking at my friend's list that this data shows very clearly most games are never completed. So if never even played through once, and dropped instead for the next latest game release, what reason is there to think these games will be picked up 3 or 4 years later and the owner will be peeved when it doesn't run on their new console, or worse won't buy a console because they won't be able to play that game they lost interest in four weeks after buying?
"Most games" don't matter. It's the games that are special to you or that your friends are playing that matter. And to some folks the principle of continued access and ownership matter even if they don't desperately need the product.
Given the choice between Steam like persistence or Xbox 1 like scattering to dust and ashes, which would I choose? No contest. And the more your have invested the more likely you are are to stay.
And again, Live and PSN are more than just digital stores! A good group of folks to play games with is priceless. Well, maybe not priceless, but worth £40 a year to millions of gamers and over half a billion dollars a year to MS.
