This week’s slate of new releases for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One serves as an illuminating indicator of the state each console is in. The PS4 has two new exclusive titles in major series that date back to the PlayStation 2 days: God of War, by all accounts a masterpiece, and Yakuza 6, a satisfying final chapter for a much-loved character. The Xbox One, on the other hand? Well, now you can play a bunch more old Xbox 1 — as in the original Xbox — games.

I don’t mean for this to sound damning, though. While Microsoft is rightly being pilloried for its anemic first-party software efforts, the Xbox One actually now has more to play on it than any other console. At least, from a certain point of view.

Back at E3 2015, Microsoft announced that the Xbox One would get backwards compatibility with select Xbox 360 games. I was in the room, and the reaction was deafening — far louder than for anything else Microsoft announced that day. At the time, I thought this was a little misplaced, though I appreciated the technical achievement. Backwards compatibility is most useful when a console first comes out, because it means you can stop using the old one; who would care about playing 360 games two years into the Xbox One’s life? Even Microsoft’s former Xbox head rubbished the idea.

I didn't expect Microsoft to implement this so brilliantly

What I didn’t know is how brilliantly Microsoft would implement the system. Whether you insert an old game into your Xbox One’s disc drive or buy a digital copy online, the title gets added to your list of games and becomes associated with your account just like any new release would be. This makes legacy titles feel like a true, native part of the platform rather than a retro hack designed to save space under the TV. It’s a really smart move on Microsoft’s part.

Things get better when you actually play these games, because in many cases they run vastly better on the new hardware. Original Xbox games are also now supported and get a 4x native resolution boost on the Xbox One and One S, or 16x on the Xbox One X — this usually means 960p on One S and 1920p on One X. 360 games load faster and often run smoother than they did on their original system, meanwhile, and sometimes even get specific enhancements for the Xbox One S and X.

It’s kind of amazing, for instance, that I can put the Mirror’s Edge disc I bought literally a decade ago into my One S and play it today with HDR support. The same goes for Halo 3, which now somehow looks better in backwards compatibility mode than it did when specifically remastered for the Xbox One in The Master Chief Collection. And in lieu of an actual re-release or PC version, what better way to prepare for Red Dead Redemption 2 than by playing through its predecessor at a higher resolution?

The example that spurred me to write this today, however, is Panzer Dragoon Orta, a Sega rail shooter that has never been released since its debut on the Xbox in 2002, but got added to the backwards compatibility list this week. It’s a legitimate lost classic, it looks better than ever now that you can play it on the Xbox One, and you can buy a digital version for $9.99 instead of digging for a disc on eBay. This is already one of my favourite game releases of 2018, which is not the sort of thing I expected to be saying back when Microsoft first announced backwards compatibility.

Another reason that backwards compatibility makes such a huge difference to the Xbox One proposition is Game Pass, Microsoft’s new Netflix-style service where you get access to its new first-party games — such as they are — along with a large third-party back catalogue for $9.99 a month. Much of this library is made up of original Xbox and Xbox 360 titles, which is a great way to encourage people to actually use the backwards compatibility feature — you may have signed up for Game Pass to play Sea of Thieves for “free,” so why not download Viva Pinata or Mass Effect while you’re at it? Again, the way Microsoft has built the backwards compatibility feature around downloads as well as discs is incredibly forward-thinking.

This is how all consoles should work

It’s also something that Sony simply isn’t able to offer, given the complexity of the PlayStation 3 hardware and consequent difficulty of emulating its software. And to be clear, Sony doesn’t really need to do it — the PS4 library is more than strong enough to make the console worth buying. If I only owned an Xbox and had the choice of being able to play the likes of Nier Automata, Uncharted, and Horizon Zero Dawn instead of a bunch of games from the last decade, I’d take it. It’s the paucity of Xbox One-exclusive content that is forcing Microsoft to find other ways to get people to use the platform.

That’s actually fine with me. I like that my Xbox One S is now a meaningfully different console to my PS4 Pro, with different use cases and functionality. It’s the box I go to for 4K Blu-rays, Forza Horizon 3 in HDR, or Ninja Gaiden Black with a usable controller. It’s the box I switch on to browse through when I’m not sure what I feel like doing, or when I’d rather play Cuphead on the couch than at my desk.

This is how all consoles should work. Now that both Microsoft and Sony are using similar, simple x86-based hardware, I expect it’s how they will. And while Sony has comprehensively beaten Microsoft this generation in most regards, this is an area where it’d do well to take notes for the future.