With Its Next Console, Xbox Is Making A Big Commitment To Backwards Compatibility

We’ve been hearing quite a lot over the past year about Xbox’s new game preservation team, indicating that the brand is working hard to ensure games remain backwards compatible on the next generation of Xbox hardware.

Most of that information has come from reports or job adverts though, so it was great to officially hear yesterday as part of Xbox’s next-gen strategy announcement that backwards compatibility is a massive focus for the future.

Xbox’s Sarah Bond specifically highlighted backwards compatibility in her speech:

“Together with AMD we’re advancing the state of art in gaming silicon to deliver the next generation of graphics innovation to unlock a deeper level of visual quality and immersive gameplay and player experiences enhanced with the power of AI, all while maintaining compatibility with your existing library of Xbox games.”

This is a bold claim considering Xbox’s next-gen strategy includes console, PC, handheld and the cloud, but they’re clearly up for the challenge. We wouldn’t necessarily expect any new additions to backwards compatibility (after all, Sarah only mentions “existing” in her statement), but who knows what the future might hold in that regard.

Anyway, it sounds like we can rest assured that our current Xbox purchases will travel with us to the next Xbox console and beyond, and let’s hope some of those console games might natively arrive on the ROG Xbox Ally at some point too.

What are your thoughts on this statement from Xbox’s Sarah Bond? Tell us in the comments below.