Backwards Compatibility
If there was one announcement that made people lose their shit at Microsoft’s E3 back in 2016, it was the announcement of backwards compatibility for Xbox 360 titles coming to the Xbox One. Ever since, Microsoft has doubled-down on the feature’s popularity, allowing for your Xbox One to even upscale and/ or improve the performance of the title compared to its original version. Then we found out that original Xbox games would be getting the same treatment, and everyone lost their shit once again.
Quick camera pan over to the Sony camp, and… nothing. The PS4 has largely been starved of backwards compatibility, with only a dozen PS2 titles making its way to PlayStation Now, and the entire collection of 355 PlayStation Classics not being compatible with the PS4.
There was an attempt to satiate fans’ desires to soak up all that nostalgia with the release of a handful of PS2 titles including many of the older Grand Theft Auto titles. However, considering the number of games the PS2 had in its library, this is barely scratching the surface. Unfortunately, the PS2 game releases compatible with the PS4 appear to have slowed down to a trickle, too with maybe one going up on the Store every few months.
The PS4 is knocking it out of the park with its current generation titles, but Microsoft is definitely in the driver’s seat when it comes to backwards compatibility and creating a universal ecosystem of hardware.
