Partner Development Lead says plans are afoot, "but we're not done thinking them through yet"
The topic of running Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One has been banded around since long before the Xbox One hit the shelves, and though Microsoft's official line has long been to keep hold of your Xbox 360 comments made this week seem to indicate that some form of backwards compatibility may eventually arrive on the system.
The information came as part of a talk given by Frank Savage, Partner Development Lead at Microsoft on the Xbox One's use of Windows technology as part of the annual Microsoft Build Developer conference this week attended by Kotaku Australia. They report that during a Q&A session, an audience member asked if Microsoft had any plans to introduce Xbox 360 emulation to the new console.Savage responded in the affirmative, although it still may be quite a while to go before we see it, saying "There are, but we're not done thinking them through yet, unfortunately. It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the X86 stuff. So there's nothing to announce, but I would love to see it myself."
There's no word either on what form the emulation will take - whether that's letting you play your old Xbox 360 disks, or making select Xbox 360 games available to download and play on your Xbox One - but it's certainly an interesting prospect. You may remember we talked to a couple of developers late last year on why backwards compatibility for the Xbox One would be very difficult, if not impossible.
Thoughts?