Xbox One Laid The Groundwork For Microsoft's Preservation Focus

gamespot.com:

As the Xbox One turns 10 years old, we take a look back how its launch troubles ultimately led Microsoft to embrace its back catalog.

By Grace Benfell on

The Xbox One is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, November 22, 2023. Below, we examine how its rough launch unexpectedly steered Microsoft toward embracing its legacy.

It's hardly an original observation, but the Xbox One predicted the future. Digital-only consoles are standard, and every console is a place where people not only play games, but watch TV and movies. However, the Xbox One did not release in the future we now live in, but when the industry was still haltingly moving toward its digital-focused future. Fairly quickly, Microsoft walked back its policy that games bought on disc would be connected directly to your Xbox account and removed the online check-in requirement. However, Xbox One's failed bet on the future that was to come had an odd side effect: Xbox began to look to the past.

In a deliciously ironic turn, backwards compatibility was set to be a launch feature on the Xbox One, but when Microsoft walked back the console's online focused policies, it had to be shelved. By 2014, the company began to develop an internal emulator to enable backwards compatibility in secret. After over a year of hard work, starting on November 9, 2015, you could play 104 Xbox 360 games on your Xbox One. Over the next few years, Microsoft added hundreds of games to the Xbox One's backwards compatibility list, from obvious hits like Halo: Reach to cult classics like Binary Domain.

This program meant that if you wanted to play a broad slice of gaming history on a single device, the Xbox One was a good bet. With it, you could explore the changing landscape of AAA