The demand is clearly there.
I do not think that was ever the issue, but the cost of doing it and then supporting it vs what the company earns from it, short and long term, tangible and intangible ones.
The demand is clearly there.
I firmly believe Sony had a good idea of how little people played PS2 games on PS3 and dropped their b/c efforts for this reason alone.
BC was removed, along with flash card readers and USB ports to cut costs. Sony's arrogant 'get a 2nd job to afford it' messaging had blown up in their faces and they needed to cut every corner possible to get the PS3 to sell and not cost Sony a couple hundred bucks every time a unit was sold.
MS listened to the Xbox owners who pushed BC constantly to the no.1 most requested feature on the Xbox wishlist forum. The demand is clearly there.
This is how it was for me on PS3. I thought it was so important but in truth if I played PS2 games more than half a dozen times I would be surprised. I remember playing GTA Vice City a few times and that's it. I think for some (perhaps many) is that backwards compatibility is a bit like a comfort blanket.Whilst cost was a factor I honestly believe that BC sounds like a great feature that is rarely used.
Come on, you surely don't really believe that? Sony were one of about two dozen companies who backed Blu-ray over a small number who backed HD-DVD but if you really believe Sony were going to die in a ditch to help a format they didn't own to benefit companies they were primarily in direct competition with in many industries, then you've lost it. This is fanboy nonsense.@DSoup - the problem was Sony want to win the BR vs HDDVD war so dropping BR was not an option. I agree tho, I think the cost of BC was fairly minimal (I think I read $20?) for a solution that not only worked with 99% of games but also improved some of them. The other thing to consider is that dropping BC means (likely) the ability re-charge for those PS2 classics digitally so not only saving money but bringing money in - and at the time Sony was losing massive amounts.
You make it sound like Sony arbitrarily removed features without purpose.
An easy win would have been offering a Blu-ray free model for digital only purchasers not interested in HD movies because blue LED lasers cost an arm and a leg.
Yes but they don't have backwards compatibility any more than Sony did.
What they have engineered is (it appears on the surface) a low resource porting system for 360 games which is reliant on Microsoft and the games publisher to actively support/consent.
No, I pointed out it was removed as a vital cost-cutting measure.
That was never going to happen. Sony desperately needed the Blu-ray drive up front and centre in PS3 as it was in effect the Trojan horse for the new optical format. Also, the public (and PSN) were not ready for a DD-only home console.
Not sure what that means or why any comparison to Sony is relevant. Are you referring to Sony's full hardware BC, it's less-supported half-software solution, or it's completely removed functionality?
The two systems are nothing alike. Sony had a recurring (hardware) cost for emulation in a limited number of PS3 consoles which inevitable had to be phased out, whereas MS have developed a software platform to allow BC for the future on all Xbox One consoles, and potentially all subsequent MS consoles and even PC's.
It's not porting, it's emulation. No change needs to be made whatsoever to the game itself. It requires a lightweight wrapper that simply lets the Xbox One know to launch the emulator. The only publisher support required is a good ol' thumbs up.
This is how it was for me on PS3. I thought it was so important but in truth if I played PS2 games more than half a dozen times I would be surprised. I remember playing GTA Vice City a few times and that's it. I think for some (perhaps many) is that backwards compatibility is a bit like a comfort blanket.
And that is the value of it.@DSoupI suppose I'm saying nothing is cut and dried, but I strongly believe that people think they need BC more than they actually do.
In many ways Microsoft's Xbox One 360 b/c solution is as limited as Sony's first revision PS3 b/c solution. The initial Japan and US launch PS3 had full PS2 hardware support by including PS2's GS and EE chips but by the time the PS3 launched in Europe the EE chip was replaced by software emulation but the emulation was not complete and only games that Sony's emulator was specifically written to handle would work without issues.
The final list of games supported in this iterative PS3 hardware revision was a tiny percent of PS2's game catalogue and after Sony dropped all b/c in the next revision PS3 momentum to add support for other PS2 games just dried up.
Even if they could just allow you to put the disk in and play (software emulation), I'm unsure if they would've let you do it, without it being on a white list of some sorts. Software emulation is a pretty grey area, what would stop MS running the emu on windows, even if publishers didn't want them to?I am not convinced this is pure emulation in the traditional machine emulator sense, i.e the emulated environment allows you to run original code. The fact that you can't just pop-in a 360 disc and have the emulator play a game you bought but instead have to download an entire new package leads me to believe they is more to Microsoft's process than merely re-packaging the original game in an Xbox One friendly file container. I can't think of a single emulator that works like this.
Microsoft aren't amateurs in the fields of emulation and virtualisation - if they could have designed an emulator that ran as either an app or in the game OS environment that let you tun 360 discs they would have done that because that doesn't require special 360 game packages, doesn't require the user download their game again and doesn't require publisher sign off.
Good grief, this again. Blu-ray is not a Sony format like MiniDisc, ATRAC or UMD. Blu-ray is a format that Sony backed over HD-DVD and they had a vested interest in it - as did a consortium of hardware manufacturers and patent holders including Dolby Laboratories, DTS Inc, Hitachi, Ltd, Intel Corporation, LG Electronics, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, TDK Corporation plus a bunch of studios. At the time, Sony were the most visible supporter of Blu-ray because of PS3.
Good grief, this again. Blu-ray is not a Sony format like MiniDisc, ATRAC or UMD. Blu-ray is a format that Sony backed over HD-DVD and they had a vested interest in it - as did a consortium of hardware manufacturers and patent holders including Dolby Laboratories, DTS Inc, Hitachi, Ltd, Intel Corporation, LG Electronics, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, TDK Corporation plus a bunch of studios. At the time, Sony were the most visible supporter of Blu-ray because of PS3.
I don't want to nit-pick, but AFAIK, the PS3 B/C solution wherein the European devices stripped and replaced some actual legacy hardware away with an emulator, was as good as one can expect a B/C feature to run.
It also did not require patches by developers for most games. The only games that did not work on this B/C solution were games that used the EE/GS combo in unique ways - essentially coding to the metal that exploited certain performance gains. The games that in the end didn't work AFAIR were some Japanese and an even more limited amount of western games.
I don't see a correlation between why Sony stripped B/C and them having good usage statistic to see how many actually used this feature.
I feel like you are grossly downplaying Sony's part and Blu-rays importance to them. I've never heard anyone else downplaying it as much as you do and I think even here it was generally accepted that Blu-ray had very big importance for Sony.
As far as I remember, Sony were positioned to be one of two (?) blue diode suppliers and one of very few BRD manufacturers. They stood to do very well from the format, and the inclusion in PS3 was possibly the key to securing some /a lot of the content providers. This going by the format war and watching which way the likes of WB were going to swing. We all know plenty of folk bought PS3 for its BluRay potential, to the point some even argue that's the only reason a lot of the early machines were bought.Good grief, this again. Blu-ray is not a Sony format like MiniDisc, ATRAC or UMD. Blu-ray is a format that Sony backed over HD-DVD and they had a vested interest in it - as did a consortium of hardware manufacturers and patent holders including Dolby Laboratories, DTS Inc, Hitachi, Ltd, Intel Corporation, LG Electronics, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, TDK Corporation plus a bunch of studios. At the time, Sony were the most visible supporter of Blu-ray because of PS3.
Why? MS have described it as just a repackaging. The emulator runs on top of the XB1 system, and needs to integrate with the system for things like game capture and services. Hence it makes sense to structure the 360 game as an XB1 app. This also plays out in why two-disc titles aren't supported yet, because the disc image file only supports a single disc and they haven't emulated dual discs in the package.I am not convinced this is pure emulation in the traditional machine emulator sense, i.e the emulated environment allows you to run original code. The fact that you can't just pop-in a 360 disc and have the emulator play a game you bought but instead have to download an entire new package leads me to believe they is more to Microsoft's process than merely re-packaging the original game in an Xbox One friendly file container. I can't think of a single emulator that works like this.
They probably could have created an emulator that boots in 360 mode, but that'd lack convenient usability. And given emulation likely isn't 100%, QA is still going to be needed to limit list of available titles to those that work. So having a system where a game has to be repackaged in an XB1 format and is tested in the process makes sense. I see little reason to think MS are lying about this and they are having to actively tweak every title to run.Microsoft aren't amateurs in the fields of emulation and virtualisation - if they could have designed an emulator that ran as either an app or in the game OS environment that let you tun 360 discs they would have done that because that doesn't require special 360 game packages, doesn't require the user download their game again and doesn't require publisher sign off.
The 360 games think they're running on the 360 OS, which they are. And the 360 OS thinks its running on the hardware, which it's not, it's running on an emulated VM. On the other side, the Xbox One thinks it's a game. That's why things like streaming, game DVR, and screenshots all work, because it thinks there's just one big game called 360.
You download a kind of manifest of wrapper for the 360 game, so we can say 'hey, this is actually Banjo, or this is Mass Effect. The emulator runs exactly the same for all the games.
I was around when we did the original Xbox [backwards compatibility] for Xbox 360 where we had a shim for every game and it just didn't scale very well. This is actually the same emulator running for all of the games. Different games do different things, as we're rolling them out we'll say 'oh maybe we have to tweak the emulator.' But in the end, the emulator is emulating the 360, so it's for everybody.