Xbox 360 – maybe it won’t be going up the loft after all

Xbox 360 games are unlikely ever to work on the Xbox One, as Microsoft admits that a Gaikai style service would be ‘really problematic’.

Neither the Xbox One nor the PlayStation 4 are backwards compatible with their immediate predecessors, which means not only can you not put in an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 disc and expect them to work but you can’t even download versions of the same games.

Sony has promised that in the future it will offer PlayStation 3 games via its Gaikai cloud streaming service, but when and how this will work remains unclear.

According to Microsoft’s Albert Penello though the Xbox One doesn’t even have that vague hope. Although he couched his comments in a manner to imply that Gaikai wouldn’t work on PlayStation 4 either…




“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,’ Penello told website Polygon.

‘So managing quality of service, the tolerance people will have for it being c*****. 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?’

It’s obvious from Penello’s comments that Microsoft is closely watching how Gaikai works out, but having recently performed their own streaming tests they seem to be convinced that it’s not yet a mass market proposition.

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