Microsoft Compares Sony’s Exclusive Line-up With Theirs, Comments On Backwards Compatability & More

In an in-depth interview by our friends at GamerTagRadio, Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg has shared his comments regarding Xbox One’s exclusive line-up for this year’s holiday season. It’s no secret that Microsoft had a great showing at E3 and although Sony’s press conference was nothing short of spectacular, Greenberg does state a very valid point in the interview. They have more exclusives coming this year compared to their competitor.

“Sony, in particular had a good show. They focused on fan favorite games and you know they have a different kind of line up than we do this year. They definitely have some games that I am looking forward to. They have Uncharted 4 which looked great. It’s exciting to see everyone kind of bringing their games and surprises. At the end of the day we do sort of have a scorecard that states how many games did we showed versus how many they showed. It was interesting because both showed off 25 games and 11 exclusive games. We showed 7 exclusives coming this Holiday and at least from our count we did not see any of their [exclusive] games confirmed for this year. I think that really is the big difference,” he stated to GamerTagRadio.

He believes that exclusives along with backwards compatability will bring over millions of Xbox 360 owners to the Xbox One this Holiday.

“We are focused on delivering big exclusives whether it’s Halo 5, Tomb Raider, Forza, Fable, Rare Replay, Gigantic…all of these games are coming exclusively this holiday so hopefully along with backwards compatibility we will be able to deliver for our fans and get that a lot of Xbox 360 owners to migrate who may be waiting for the new Gears or Halo. We are expecting millions of those gamers to move over this holiday.”

One of the games that was absent at Microsoft’s press conference was Phantom Dust. The game is currently going through a rough development period. Aaron confirmed that the game is not canceled but there is no active development on the game at the moment. “It has been a passion project for Phil and a lot of folks on the team and we are currently exploring what we are going to do in the long term. The project is not cancelled. We don’t have an active developer on it right now but it’s a project that like many things will take a little more time but at this point we are not giving any more updates on it.”

He also revealed how backwards compatability came along and explained some of its features such as screenshots and streaming to Windows 10 PC.

“This is something that with the architecture design we were not expected to do but we have some of the brightest software engineers in the world. They spent a lot of time working on trying to emulate this. So what it does is it runs an Xbox 360 in full emulation on the Xbox One. Games think they are actually on an Xbox 360 and that is brilliant for a lot of reasons. First, developers don’t have to do any work for their games to work and because if you remember with 360, we had to touch a lot of games for backwards compatability. The other thing is you will be able to chat with people on the Xbox 360 and it runs within Xbox One so you can do screenshots and all that. So think of other functionality…you can stream those games to the Windows 10 PC. ”

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think backwards compatability will be a game changer for Xbox One? Sound off in the comments section below.

And make sure you listen to the entire interview here for more details.