Xbox One backwards compatibility officially ruled out

Many of us are sceptical on cloud gaming and it seems Microsoft is too as the company's Director of Product Planning, Albert Penello, has told us why there won't there won't be a Gaikai like service for the Xbox One.

Sony has promised Playstation gamers it'll incorporate the Gaikai service in the PS4, allowing owners to stream their old favourite PS3 games, but details on how it works or when it will be available are still non existent. Microsoft on the other hand sees such a service as “too problematic” to get working.

Albert Penello said in an interview with Polygon:

“It’s really cool and really problematic, all at the same time, insofar as it’s really super cool if you happen to have the world’s most awesome Internet connection. It works way better than you’d expect it to,” he continued, fitting in as many positive adjectives as he could think of. “So managing quality of service, the tolerance people will have for it being c*****. Can you imagine, in this day and age, with the bad information around, and we can’t control the quality of that experience and make sure it’s good, or have to tell people they can’t do it?’”

Microsoft is clearly keeping an eye on how Gaikai turns out but it seems it doesn't want to compete with the service until it knows it will work well for consumers.

Cloud gaming is becoming more of a focus though. Square Enix recently announced Project FLARE and we still don't know how Gaikai will turn out but we do have a demo video of HAWKEN running through the service: [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2i01vGsbOk']

Kitguru Says: I don't blame Microsoft for wanting to wait and see how cloud services will work. The company has already had plenty of bad press since the Xbox One's announcement – releasing a broken service wouldn't help.

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