Posted Fri Nov 13, 2015 at 02:21 PM PST by Justin Clark
They're working on it, promise.
So, the good news is that backward compatibility runs like a dream on Xbox One so far. The bad news, of course is that the list of games is a bit....well...underwhelming. We already know the 104 games we currently have aren't remotely the end of this--at bare minimum, 'Fallout 3', the three 'Bioshock' games and 'Halo: Reach' are confirmed on their way--but if you were wondering why we haven't seen more of the big guns yet, like, say, 'Red Dead Redemption', it might help you to hear right from the horse's mouth what the hold up is. The tl;dr answer? Ask the publishers.
In a massive, surprisingly in-depth interview with Eurogamer, Xbox engineering head Richard Irving elaborated on how the business side of backward compatibility worked, and the scarcity makes a lot of sense: " As you can imagine, publishers have cut very specific deals on some of that content [released originally for 360]. For example 'Madden' - you can imagine how many licenses go into a game with the players, the NFL, sponsors and so on. And there's over 1000 games at this point on Xbox 360. It didn't seem fair to ask our partners to go off and find licenses for all this Xbox 360 content so what we opted to do instead was to give fans the opportunity to prioritise which games they want. So then we can re-engage with publishers and ask about specific games and say, 'please let us know if this is something you can do'. So it's really up to publishers to approve it."
"Publishers are super engaged and responsive to that stuff, the response was overwhelming from fans. It's just that some of the content takes longer than others to organise, so we weren't able to get all of the top 50 or 100 games, but we have a good number of them."
So, with that in mind, when asked point blank about where 'Red Dead', and the rest of Rockstar's 360 catalogue stands, Irving replied "We're definitely engaged with all of our publisher and developer partners - including Rockstar - on when and how we can develop on that fan feedback."
Just FYI, 'Red Dead Redemption's currently sitting at #2 on the Most Wanted list, just behind 'Call of Duty: Black Ops II'. Also, Rockstar's Twitter handle is @rockstargames. Just throwing that out there.
Source: Eurogamer
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