Developers don't have to do anything except let Microsoft ensure that the old games work on the new console

Jul 7, 2015 11:02 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft confirms that it's employed a pretty straightforward method to obtain backwards compatibility on the Xbox One with older Xbox 360 titles. The mechanism, which emulates the older console's operating system, requires very little input from the developers of the original titles.

Microsoft made quite a few big announcements at E3 2015 last month, chief among which being the fact that the Xbox One would get backwards compatibility with older Xbox 360 games later this year. At that time, Microsoft confirmed some of the few games that would be available through this program at launch, and promised to share more details soon enough.

The Xbox 360 backwards compatibility for Xbox One isn't that complex

Now, while talking with Edge, Microsoft Xbox boss Phil Spencer confirms that the method his team employed to actually obtain the backwards compatibility is pretty straightforward.

More or less, the Xbox One is running the Xbox 360 operating system in a virtual environment, and thanks to the method, developers of the older titles don't have to do anything so that their games can work as intended on the new console.

"That was the most difficult thing: could we get the 360 OS to boot so it thinks it’s running on native hardware? The nice thing is that the developers don’t have to do anything. They approve the game, we run it through a test pass, obviously, to make sure everything’s fine, then we have to wrap it up as an Xbox One game so the Xbox One knows you’re actually running a game," he explains.

As such, it seems that only Microsoft's backwards compatibility team is doing the heavy lifting, so there's nothing stopping developers of older Xbox 360 titles from giving their blessing and seeing their past games appear on the Xbox One.

Around 100 titles are promised to appear when the feature launches later this year, so expect to hear and see more of them as we get closer to the end of 2015.