Xbox chief Peter Moore gave comments to Kikizo in regards to the 360,s direction, backwards compatibility support and new hard drives for the next-gen console.
In regards to larger hard drives for the 360, he said, “…"there’s going to be a time when we need to look at what we’re doing – but no announcements now. We continue looking at the hard drive, we’re looking at the behavior of what people are doing with their hard drives. Clearly when you have a million downloads you start looking at what you need to do."
Moore,s comments are related to the immense popularity of Microsoft,s Xbox Live online service. As any PC gamer can attest to, hard drive space fills up quite rapidly when downloading game demos and other related media. The “premium” edition of the 360 has a relatively miniscule 20GB onboard drive. With the enormous amount of downloadable material found on Xbox Live, the 20GB drive tends to fill up quickly.
Previously, Michael Wolf, public relations manager for Xbox, made the statement that, "Our goal is to have every Xbox game work on Xbox 360,” according to Game Industry. And indeed, Microsoft has been working overtime in making as many Xbox titles backwards compatible with the 360.
However, Moore seems to have reversed course on this commitment by Microsoft by saying: "Nobody is concerned anymore about backwards compatibility. We under promised and over delivered on that. It’s a very complicated thing… very complex work. I’m just stunned that we have hundreds of games that are backwards compatible. That doesn’t mean we won’t get more backwards-compatible games – indeed, more are coming – but at some point, you just go, there’s enough, let’s move on, or people aren’t as worried about a game being backwards compatible – and I like to think we’ve upheld our end of the bargain in making at least two or maybe three hundred games backwards compat[ible]."
Moore,s proclamation that “nobody is concerned about backwards compatibility” belies the issue that there are Xbox fans who are very much concerned with the issue of backwards compatibility. The sudden change in policy by Microsoft may be a realization that making all Xbox games playable on the 360 is a task not only more difficult than the Big M first realized, but is rather costly, as well.
