Last year, I made note of the fact that Microsoft might use the introduction of the Xbox One X to transition to a rolling compatibility model, similar to what is most common in the smartphone market- where all your devices will not just be backward compatible, but many will also continue to be forward compatible for as long as they can be.
What this means is, once the successor to the Xbox One X is out, there is a possibility that the Xbox One X could still play games released for that system- at least for a few years, before it is phased out entirely. This might have been something Microsoft’s Albert Penello hinted at recently. In fact, he even made the comparison with smartphones and PCs, where this model is most prevalent.
“We care a lot about compatibility, we have a huge effort around compatibility, and that’s not just backwards compatibility,” he said to MCV UK.
“I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that we care a lot about compatibility and in this day and age people have shifted to caring more about their community and their apps, than caring about the piece of hardware that they’re on, and we have just moved with that,” he continued.
I don’t know how Microsoft would pull this off, especially if Sony releases a more powerful than Xbox One X, PS5 within the next few years and raises the baseline specs for third party developers to target- but the console market is certainly in a state of transition and flux, and it will be interesting to see how things unfold from here on out.