While there has been some confusion over just how backward compatibility works on the Xbox One, it appears Microsoft is making it even easier to play old games on the current generation console.

Major Nelson confirmed on Reddit that the backward compatible team has done some work in order to make dual disc Xbox 360 games playable on the Xbox One. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director’s Cut, was the first of these types of games to be offered up and the service is now 100 percent live.

Backward compatible games started rolling out last year after the service was first announced at E3. Since the service started getting offered there have been more and more games available in the program. Dual Disc games are the newest addition to the game library. There are more games added to the collection almost every day and it pays to check to see what games are going to be in the service on a weekly basis.

The New Xbox One Experience has received a new update though it’s nothing exceptional.

According to Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb on Twitter, “A system update update for Xbox One is going out today. It’s got a few behind the scenes bug fixes. No new features though.”

So if you’ve noticed some bugs fixed here and there, that’s probably the reason. The New Xbox One Experience debuted in November and since then, we haven’t seen any major new features in the game.

That being said, Microsoft has promised more support for the Xbox One in the new year though it will be worth seeing if it can top its sprint in 2015. Not every update will arrive by year-end either so don’t worry about the next big update arriving in Fall.

What are your thoughts on the New Xbox One Experience? Let us know in the comments below and stay tuned for more updates on the same.

It appears that the way Microsoft has rolled out its backwards compatibility for the Xbox One has even confused some of the people who work for the company. That might not be nearly as surprising as one would think, considering that the launch of the backwards compatibility has hardly been as smooth as the company had hoped. It appears that Microsoft’s corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi is one of those execs that isn’t really sure how this is all working now that everything is live.

According to WCCFTech, Mehdi gave a talk to the Credit Suisse Technology Conference, where he answered a question from analyst Philip Winslow regarding Xbox 360 DLC support for the Xbox One through backwards compatibility, and his answer was quite confused. In the grand scheme of things, the fact that he answered he didn’t believe Xbox 360 DLC was available on the Xbox One just yet when it actually is available now isn’t a huge deal.

On the other hand, it is interesting that the company doesn’t have this kind of information straight from one level of the company to another. The fact of the matter is that Xbox 360 DLC is indeed available on the Xbox One for games that are supported through backwards compatibility. Hopefully at some point, Microsoft’s execs will be able get straightened out on this in the near future.

The Xbox Live Games With Gold titles for December have been revealed and they’re a pretty big step up from November. Keep in mind that with the New Xbox One Experience adding backwards compatibility for Xbox 360 titles, Xbox One players will now have access to a wider range of free games going forward.

Xbox One players get their hands on The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, one of the better Diablo clones out there, throughout December. Meanwhile, Eidos Montreal’s meh reboot of Thief will be available from December 16th to January 15th 2016.

Xbox 360 gamers are in for a treat – along with Castlestorm (available until December 15th) and Sacred 3 (available from December 16th to December 31st), they’ll get their hands on Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising from December 16th to 31st.

And for Xbox One players, this means five free games for December. What are your thoughts on the Free Games With Gold offerings next month? Let us know in the comments.

The New Xbox One Experience just launched a few days ago, and it was a remarkably smooth rollout, with few to no bugs, presumably because of the extensive large scale beta testing, thanks to the Xbox Preview Program. So it is probably surprising to see that a new update is already available.

The new update was announced by Major Nelson on his Facebook page today, and doesn’t seem to be anything too major- just some routine behind the scenes fixes. It is good to see Microsoft are still working on the console’s UI even now. It gives me confidence that if there are any bugs with the New Xbox One Experience, they won’t be there for long.

But anyway, this current update- no major updates. No new features added. Just some behind the scenes tweaking. Still, you need it to be able to go online, so you might as well download and install it, right?

For all the talk about Microsoft selling off or even shutting down its Xbox division, things are going as strong as ever. Speaking at the UBS Global Technology Conference, CFO Amy hood spoke about the relevance of the Xbox brand to the company going forward.

“Xbox is financially relevant to Microsoft. People should not be confused about the journey of improvement we have been on in the past two years in the Xbox business.”

Microsoft has also been working to integrate Windows 10 with Xbox One, especially when it comes to the New Xbox One Experience. “I think about the importance of gaming. I would actually literally, very specifically talk about the importance of gaming to us; you’ve seen the investments we’ve made; you’ve seen us talk about gaming and its importance across all form factors for us, be it the PC, be it a phone, be it the console itself.

“I think we’ve done a very good job of taking something that sort of sat outside the Windows ecosystem and made it part of the Windows ecosystem. So that gaming value accrues back to the ecosystem and to the developers who work there.

“I would say gaming is fundamentally important. The Xbox brand is still an incredibly powerful brand; gaming PCs are amongst the most lucrative businesses to be in. Gaming as a category is quite profitable and I feel good about how we’ve changed the landscape of what that looks like as a company.”

With the Xbox One gaining momentum, even outselling the PS4 in October, fortune seems to be turning in favour of Microsoft. We’ll see if it can keep up this momentum heading into the new year.

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The option to have your own custom image be the background image has been available to Xbox One owners for quite a while now, but with the recent launch of the New Xbox One Experience, which brings the Windows 10 experience to the Xbox One, Microsoft is taking things a step further. On his blog, Major Nelson has gone ahead and posted a Photoshop template for creating and designing your own custom images for your Xbox- you can go ahead and download the template from here.

Here is a refresher on how to set your own custom background, if you needed a reminder. Major Nelson is inviting all fans and users to share their custom images for the Xbox One, assuming they wish to.

The New Xbox One Experience is out now on Xbox One; it finally fixes a lot of longstanding issues with the Xbox one UI, and also brings some long awaited features, such as backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games, to the console.

The Xbox One’s backwards compatibility feature has officially launched for all users and while Microsoft is noticeably excited about that launch, it hasn’t gone without some problems. While launch problems for something like this should be expected, because it’s entirely new and on a large scale, some users are reporting the service isn’t working at all. According to ThisGenGaming the biggest issue coming from users is they have digital Xbox 360 games that aren’t showing up in the ready to install section of the Xbox One while others are.

Other users are saying none of their digital Xbox 360 games are showing up at all. Digital games are not the only titles that are seeing some problems. There are also reports that disc based games are being inserted but not showing up and giving an error message instead. This is despite the fact that UK Xbox went so far as to taunt Sony by showing a video of just how “easy” it was to use backwards compatibility simply by inserting a disc.

This report comes on the heels of a number of reports of users having issues getting the new dashboard to work the way it’s supposed to work. Obviously, considering this new UI is brand new, there are going to be some issues at launch. If Microsoft really wants to score the points it can by offering the backwards compatibility service, it’s going to want to fix the issues rather quickly. Hopefully, for Xbox One users, the practice the company has had all summer will help.

Microsoft has made a miraculous recovery with the Xbox One, the console that was launching as the antithesis of everything gamers wanted from a new console, to a highly gamer friendly and focused device, with user friendly features, great games, and a company that dynamically responds to fan feedback.

The culmination of this effort is the New Xbox One Experience, which launched yesterday, and does away with the misguided, media centric Xbox One UI that the system launched with, that has since been patched and patched to be more user friendly and games friendly. Speaking on the eve of the launch of the NXE, Microsoft’s Mike Nichols discussed the update, as well as the general future of the Xbox One, in an interview with Gamespot.

“It’s arguably the most significant release we’ve ever made to a console–and that anybody’s ever made to a console,” he said.

Does the New Xbox Experience mark the end of the kind of monthly updates that Xbox One fans have come to expect for their consoles? Not necessarily, Nichols said.

“The answer is there no set schedule for major user experience changes. We only really want to introduce a lot of changes when we have incredibly high confidence that the upside from the change is really going to deliver fantastic results for people. Because once somebody gets used to something, it can be disorienting to have a change. So we really want to be thoughtful about when we do that sort of thing. And we feel really good about the layout that we are introducing with the new UI and hopefully that layout continues to remain and still intuitive and well-designed that we won’t have to make a lot of changes.

“We’ll just add more features and tweak things as opposed to a more fundamental re-think. If we find, over time, that there is a better way to navigate information then we will go ahead and try to do that on whatever time frame we find and is necessary. We feel so good about this experience that we want to see how people react to it. There’s no set frequency; we’ll do it when we feel like we can make a big improvement to the experience for people.”

Nichols also discussed the state of the competition, and where he sees Xbox in the larger industry ecosystem.

“I definitely think it’s going to be a big holiday for Xbox fans. Our primary focus is on our own pace. Our primary focus has and has been and remains on really delivering great products for consumers. We do feel fantastic about the lineup we’re delivering. We have chosen really to focus on delivering new value and when you put together the exclusives, backwards compatibility, and all the great third-party games coming, and the new experience innovations that we’re introducing…we put all of that stuff together with [bundles]. We really feel good about the value we’re delivering per dollar spent.

“And certainly we feel it is probably the strongest value message we’ve had of value per dollar spent. I feel like it compares very favorably with other alternatives in the market. But ultimately, customers are going to decide. And that’s one of the really great things about our industry–is that competition is healthy for everybody. It’s resulting in some terrific gaming systems and terrific games and hopefully a lot more fun for customers; ultimately, that’s what we’re all in this thing for.”

Personally, I agree with him, and I also appreciate Microsoft’s immense effort in turning the Xbox One ship around. It has left us with a great system and some great games as well.

Microsoft has been great with regular updates for the Xbox One ever since its launch, they have already released the New Xbox one Experience today, which is a complete and total overhaul of the console UI, but the console’s launch was a mess- the Xbox One launched with some very basic functionality missing, and while so much of it has been added in the years since, in many ways, Xbox One is still not on par with the Xbox 360.

The reason for that is that there is a platform reset each time a new console is introduced, Microsoft’s Richard Irving told Eurogamer. He also said that the Xbox One is a long term platform that will continue to evolve, and should get more and more features with time.

“It’s important for us to look at the evolution of things,” he said. “A new console generation, a new platform launch, means you have to look at what features to bring forward and what to build for the future – five to 10 years away.”

He put this in context of the Xbox 360, and its evolution with time.

“If you look at Xbox 360 now, you have 100 times more features than you did when the console launched. You didn’t have streaming HD video services at the time, and now that’s the future of television. You didn’t have a common friends list across all of your games, and now it’s expected as standard. So with Xbox One we looked at what we want to accomplish, what publishers want, what fans want, and you make trade-offs based on what you will leave behind, betting on the future.

“In some areas I think we made some great decisions. In other areas there was an opportunity to learn from the launch and there was a lot of space to – in the two years since then – build on that. And that’s why the new dashboard is the next step but not the final step. We have addressed a lot of the highest priority stuff from fans and from game developers but there’s still so much stuff we can do to evolve how games exist on the platform and on Xbox Live.”

As of right now, there is very little that I can say the Xbox 360 does or did, that the Xbox One will not do, so kudos to Microsoft for delivering on that front.