Microsoft revealed a great deal about Project Scarlett at their E3 2019 press event. A lot of it was what many of us had expected they’d talk about- an SSD, AMD components, ray tracing. Another one of those things was backward compatibility, which has been something Microsoft has been pushing a great deal with Xbox in recent years, and will continue to do moving forward.
Microsoft claimed that Xbox Scarlett (or whatever they end up calling it) will have “four generations worth of content”- which should mean that all previous Xbox generations will be supported through backward compatibility. Recently, in an interview with Gaming Instincts, Microsoft’s Ben Stillwell was asked about a clarification on if that is indeed what that means, and while he stopped short of confirming it, he did say that backward compatibility is something that Microsoft will continue to focus on with Scarlett.
“So what I’ll say is at least right now, we’ll have more to announce on that really soon and I’ll leave it as that for right now,” he said. “But I will say that as a company, it’s important for us that compatibility is something that we’re working on. The team that I was on previously that did the Xbox Backwards Compatibility, we also did all of the Xbox One X compatibility before we went to the next console. So it’s certainly something that as a company we have a great platform change and it’s something that keeps going no matter what we do.”
Considering their stance on it with the Xbox One, it’s not surprising that backward compatibility is something Microsoft will continue to focus on with next gen as well. Meanwhile, Sony, too, are putting a great deal of emphasis on the PS5’s backward compatibility, and how they plan to leverage it. Read more on that through here.
