“If you’re backwards compatible, you’re really backwards,” former Xbox chief Don Mattrick — now running things at Zynga —(in)famously saidfollowing the Xbox One’s troubled reveal in May, referring to the new console’s inability to play games from the Xbox and Xbox 360. In a meeting in New York this week, Microsoft’s Albert Penello didn’t call the pursuit backwards, but he did concede that experiments with streaming solutions had proven too “problematic” to be rolled out to consumers.
In the months following Mattrick’s statement, Microsoft has made great efforts to distance itself from that, and many other, errors in messaging. In September, Penello, senior director of product management and planning at Xbox, said that itmay be possiblefor the Xbox One to support earlier Xbox titles using the company’s much-vaunted cloud server technology. “It could be more complicated things like rendering full games like a Gaikai and delivering it to the box,” Penello told GameSpot, referring to Sony’s still-unproven solution for prior-generation compatibility on PlayStation 4. “We just have to figure out how, over time, how much does that cost to deliver, how good is the experience.”
