Microsoft has done an excellent job with the Xbox One and supporting previous-gen game investments by making it backwards compatible with a large selection of last generation titles.

At the time of this post, Microsoft says that gamers have logged more than 508 million hrs of gaming on older titles. And if you are thinking that this is a small part of the user base playing a lot of games, the company says that about 50% of gamers have played a backwards compatible title on their console.

Phil Spencer jumped into the conversation started by Mike Nichols who is the CMO for Xbox, and said that on a typical day, one or two backwards compatible titles are part of the top played games for the Xbox franchise.

The company doesn’t say which games have made it into the ‘daily play’ charts but based on the entire conversation thread, that you can view here, it would not surprise me if Call of Duty, Black Ops II, is one of the games on the list.

These stats are higher than I would have expected but goes to show the value in supporting older games on current gen consoles. It also helps to justify why Microsoft is working diligently to make sure that many of the popular titles from yesterday will continue to work today as the usage rate is quite high for this functionality.

Knowing all this, support for backwards compatibility is expected to be as good as the Xbox One or possibly better for the Scorpio. That console will come out later this year and we should learn a lot more about the launch details and games for that console at E3 early next week.

Tagged with Xbox