Games: XBox 360 and XBLA Titles Won't Carry Over to XBox One But Achievements and Gamerscore Will

Games: XBox 360 and XBLA Titles Won’t Carry Over to XBox One But Achievements and Gamerscore Will

XBox Live

As we learned already, the XBox One isn’t going to be backwards compatible with XBox 360 games. Personally, I don’t see this as an issue. When I got my XBox 360, I didn’t worry about playing my original XBox games on it. And any of us who were born before the PS2 rose to prominence remember the days when we got our SNES and the only ones who questioned if the NES games would still play on it were our parents. We didn’t care back then.

In an interview with The Verge, Microsoft Xbox Live vice president Marc Whitten said, “The system is based on a different core architecture, so back-compat doesn’t really work from that perspective.” As a result, the content of the XBox Live Arcade on the XBox 360 won’t be able to carry over to the XBox One. Since the XBox One’s hardware configuration won’t support XBox 360 discs, it makes sense that the downloadable content would not be supported as well.

“Those games will continue to run on your Xbox 360 for as long as your Xbox 360 runs,” Microsoft Game Studios VP Phil Spencer told GameSpot. “The box is not backward compatible and we think for somebody who invests in a large digital library that you want to keep your [Xbox 360]. Keep that as a vibrant part of the ecosystem.”

One piece of information we are happy to hear though is that our gamer tag, achievements and gamer score will all remain intact. “That’s why we’ve made sure that your identity, your friends, are constant between both platforms. You don’t have a separate identity on Xbox one or [Xbox 360]; it’s the same, you are you,” Spencer said. “My friend’s network is the same on both boxes, my achievements are the same. So we think that service component is an important component to keep constant across both devices.”

It was stated that the XBox Live friends lists couldn’t be increased because it would break XBox Live on original XBox games. Now that there is no XBox Live on those original systems to worry about anymore, maybe Microsoft can finally let us get more out of our system with its massive processing power than a paltry 100 friends.

Stay tuned for more on the XBox One as E3 fast approaches.