Now that the dust from E3 2015 has settled, many of us have begun the long wait for the holiday season. Games like Fallout 4, Halo 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider were heavily showcased, but there's one E3 announcement that everyone's still talking about.

The summer is typically thin for game releases as many publishers hold off for the holiday season. Heavy hitting game news waits for E3 and Gamescom and the hype trains lull as marketing teams shift their focus until after the summer - since some gamers braver than myself actually, like, go outside. There is one snippet of E3 news that continues to make headlines, continues to be scrutinized and discussed. It is the bombshell of Xbox One's backward compatibility with Xbox 360 games - a feature that I believe will come to shape the console war in the months and years to come.

Looking backward In the console space, Sony is Microsoft's only major competition, and so far the PS4 has trounced the Xbox One in terms of sales. The PS4's market share is upwards of 70% in Europe, which represents a major shift from the previous generation. The Xbox One reveal was obscured by revelations that it would be more expensive, and that Xbox One games would ship with Digital Rights Management (DRM). The news put the PS4 ahead by leaps and bounds in terms of public relations. This is especially true in Europe, where the PS4 launched far earlier than the Xbox One in several territories. Best VPN providers 2020: Learn about ExpressVPN, NordVPN & more The thing is; the vast majority of gamers don't read up on gaming news or engage in Twitter console wars on an active basis. The word-of-mouth is an unsung hero (or villain) in marketing, and it's a difficult beast to control. I do I.T. for schools, and anecdotally, I still have students tell me that the Xbox One can't run used games, and can only run in 720p. Still, millions of these same people are still clinging to the last gen, and the argument to Jump Ahead may be a tough sell for those who still have dozens of Xbox 360 games.

Backward compatibility has a wide, wide range of benefits across the board, but the biggest for Microsoft is that it adds incentive for past gen holdouts to go green instead of blue. If Microsoft advertise this feature properly, the common-sense purchase argument for millions of Xbox 360 owners will shift from "the Xbox One can't do 1080p" to "the PS4 can't run my Xbox 360 games". This is an easy and powerful narrative casual fans like my company's school students can get behind. Beyond casual fans, backward compatibility is a powerful differentiator between two systems that are largely the same. Both consoles run apps, both have fees for multiplayer, and both run all the latest and greatest games (exclusives notwithstanding). As a result, most discussions between owners always boil down to resolution. Former Xbox 360 fans who felt slighted by the Xbox One's launch policies and exaggerated resolution issues may consider coming back over to the green side, 360 collection in tow. Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool. Sony's E3 conference won a ton of praise for Final Fantasy 7 and Shenmue related announcements, and Microsoft's response should be holiday marketing that features hundreds of beloved 360 titles of yesteryear. Free to use, all native, and with a perpetually expanding line-up. Make no mistake, backward compatibility is a killer-feature. 180 to 360 - Getting Xbox back into the retailer's favor As mentioned earlier, the Xbox One's launch Digital Rights Management (DRM) policies were somewhat ill-received. Beyond the supposed moral outrage of trying to help publishers siphon money from brick-and-mortar retail, many had legitimate concerns over how used games would work on the Xbox One. Microsoft's Xbox One DRM model was complex to explain succinctly, particularly in marketing. Essentially, each disk would come with a digital license and a physical license. When you installed the game from the disk, you'd be able to access the game from anywhere providing that particular disk wasn't installed on another console. If you sold the disk, the license would transfer to a new console, but there was a limit on the number of times a disk would be transferrable. If you wanted to trade in a game that had already been transferred once, you'd have to do it via "participating" retailers, who had the ability to unlock the disks for re-sale. What a mouthful. There was a great deal of uncertainty about this system from both fans and investors. Some speculated that retailers would pass on the cost of unlocking Xbox One disks to consumers. One of the benefits of the DRM was to allow gamers to pool their licenses with up to 10 people, but it was poorly communicated. Microsoft spent the majority of their time defending the policy rather than explaining the benefits. Sony capitalized on the convoluted messaging with a now-infamous YouTube video sarcastically explaining you can share PS4 games simply by handing them over.

Consumers were outraged, but arguably it was retailers who had the most to lose. Despite arguments that used game sales harm the industry, they're a brick-and-mortar retail store's bread-and-butter. Reselling the same disk over and over at a marked-up price essentially creates money out of thin air. There's little doubt that some used games might pass through the same retail store multiple times. Each transaction generates free cash for those embattled companies, who face increased competition from the likes of Amazon. Microsoft had removed the DRM before the Xbox One hit the shelves. Powerful retailers like Gamestop weighed in their delight: ..."GameStop welcomes today's announcement from Microsoft about changes in functionality for its next-generation console, the Xbox One. This is great news for gamers, and we applaud Microsoft for understanding consumers and the importance of the pre-owned market."... Gamestop and other retailers that rely on used game sales saw their share prices damaged by the Xbox One's used games policies. There were anecdotal reports that Gamestop planned to limit orders of Xbox One units because of the DRM's potential damage to their earnings. Whether or not retailers pushed PS4 over Xbox One in the early days is hard to verify. But, at the very least, Microsoft have taken their used games 180 to a full 360 - creating new retail opportunities for those companies it irked during the launch.