Clarifying a leaked internal stream in which Halo 4 was seen running on PC, lead of planning for the Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Kinect Albert Penello talked about how it was simply an experiment. He also talked about how providing backwards compatibility for the Xbox One using Cloud streaming is a bit of a problem.
Speaking to Polygon, Penello stated, “In the world of things I wish they had not shown at the Company Meeting because I knew I’d be asked about it later, put that at the top of my list. That is a good example, in certain circumstances [the cloud streaming] worked really awesome.
“It’s really cool and really problematic, all at the same time, insofar as it’s really super cool if you happen to have the world’s most awesome internet connection. It works way better than you’d expect it to.
“So managing quality of service, the tolerance people will have for it being crappy. Can you imagine, in this day and age, with the bad information around, and we can’t control the quality of that experience and make sure it’s good, or have to tell people they can’t do it?”
So while it’s a great idea and we may see it somewhere down the line, it might not be any time soon. “It was a grand experiment, I know we did a lot of work behind it, and we said this is one of the things where the network just has to get better before we can do it. When that happens, you’re going to have a really interesting conversation around that, can I actually run Xbox One games that way as well.”
The Xbox One launches on November 22nd across 13 territories worldwide.