According to a recent study by Ars Technica, only 1.5 percent of Xbox One users’ time is spent playing Xbox 360 backward compatible games. On top of that, the only backward compatible game that made the list of the top 100 most popular Xbox One apps was Call of Duty: Black Ops.
The analysis was done by taking a random sample of data from 930,000 active Xbox One gamertags over the course of five months. Out of 1,526 average minutes that Xbox One users were active during this sample period, only 23.9 minutes were spent playing Xbox 360 backward compatible games.
Meanwhile, 54.7 percent of user time was spent playing Xbox One games, while 16.5 percent was spent watching Netflix (or falling asleep while Netflix was still on).
This study seems to confirm that Sony global sales chief Jim Ryan’s excuse for why PlayStation 4 wasn’t getting a backward compatibility program is actually legitimate. The numbers don’t lie.
That being said, the fact that Xbox does have backward compatibility wins it some bragging rights over PlayStation 4, which Xbox has been keen to exploit in the past. It’s not that backward compatibility is a killer app that sells consoles. It’s that bragging about having backward compatibility makes PS4 players wish they had it, too, thus sowing (however tiny) the seeds of discontent within the user base.
The method of this and a related study might be a bit flawed, however, seeing as how the most popular non-game app was the “My games & apps” tab. For non-Xbox users, “My games and apps” is where you navigate in the Xbox UI to simply manage and start your games and apps. We’re not sure if an app you use to open other apps should really count in this kind of analysis.
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Source: http://www.egmnow.com/all/xbox-one-backward-compatibility-isnt-as-popular-as-you-think/
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