In 2013, Sony took to the E3 stage to announce that not only would the PS4 not rely on a constant internet connection, not be inextractible from a motion control peripheral, and actually play used games, it would also be priced $400, a hundred less than the Xbox One which had just debuted with all of the aforementioned baggage. But in 2015, it was Microsoft's turn to throw Sony for a loop by announcing that the Xbox One would be backwards compatible with the Xbox 360.

I wouldn’t say that the two are quite on the same level in regards to surprise hardware announcements, as Sony’s blow was so savage and deep the Xbox One is still trying to recover, but the One’s new backward compatibility was one of the only significant hardware stories of this year’s event, and clearly threw Sony for a loop, as evidenced by a Eurogamer interview with Shuhei Yoshida.

“I didn’t think it was possible,” Yoshida said. “There must be lots of engineering effort.”

He’s also a little skeptical about how it might work in practice.

“They talked about 100 games, but what kind of games will be included? Is it smaller games or big games? We don’t know.”

Right now, Microsoft is having fans vote on which games they want to see supported the most, as the system works on a case by case basis to ensure whatever architecture the old game was built on can now fit into the new system.

Posted: Jun 20, 2015 8:31 pm
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/06/20/xbox-ones-backward-compatibility-surprised-sony-as-much-as-anyone/