Xbox has a new team dedicated to game preservation and forward compatibility

I really like what MS is doing with the Series S&#x2F;X. I don&#x27;t play video games all that much but when I do, I like turning on games that make me nostalgic for when I was a kid. So far I&#x27;ve bought a number of older games off the Xbox store and for games that aren&#x27;t available I run the Xbox in dev mode and run a PS2 emulator.<p>I&#x27;m particularly impressed with XBSX2 and PCSX2, I have an OG PS2 (fat one) but I seldomly use it because when you plug it into a big screen TV the graphics are all out of whack because it was designed with older &quot;fat&quot; TV&#x27;s in mind. The emulators though allow you to upscale graphics which makes them so much more playable on a large screen TV. Granted there are bugs and various issues you have to get over and setting up the entire system can be a little challenging and time consuming but it&#x27;s hard to complain.<p>And overall I think the Series S is one of the best bangs for your buck in the game console space, at $299, it&#x27;s much cheaper than even the PS5 digital edition that comes in at $450. Though I bought mine back during the &quot;PS5 Crunch&quot; where the only PS5&#x27;s you could find online were all resellers that marked them up 1.5-2X the original price, so $299 versus $600-700 was a great deal.

This is about selling older games in their digital store, not about ensuring your old disks can still run, right?

I own every generation of Xbox. Multiples of most. I have gotten an incredible deal on each and every one. And the physical and digital games typically go cheap quickly. 20+ years. Not sure what their strategy is but I’ve benefited.

Bought an xbone recently for a few titles, all my old Xbox games work. Nothing more to add.

I don&#x27;t understand how Microsoft handle&#x27;s Xbox backwards compatibility on the Series S&#x2F;X, but under the hood there are clearly stubs to trampoline original expected behaviors to unsupported dialog messages.<p>Some legacy games appear to not support split-screen anymore, as far as I can tell from the store pages of specific Xbox 360-era games.<p>All-in-all, it&#x27;s a subpar experience that I think will only continue to be disappointing, and the only real solution is to find used hardware and play the games in the manner they were originally designed.<p>Anything off the digital stores will be subject to alteration, sometimes just because they can, it seems.

This does not seem an impossible problem for the likes of Microsoft. They own all of the Xbox APIs and backwards compatibility is in their DNA. Especially now that consoles are just regular computer hardware with a funny hat.<p>I think the business people calculated that keeping the full game library available for the initial investment of compatibility APIs is totally worth it. It becomes a huge differentiator if Sony cannot&#x2F;does not follow the playbook.<p>Sell your game on Xbox. Forever.

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I can&#x27;t believe some people here are criticizing MS. I got a Series X and <i>digital</i> games I had bought almost 20 years ago on the very first iteration of the XBOX Digital Store simply worked with no extra fees. I don&#x27;t know anyone else delivering this kind of backwards compatibility.