Welcome to State of Play, an editorial column brought to you by Pixelated Geek. In State of Play, we’ll be dealing with major issues in the gaming community, and we’ll be reaching out to our community for feedback and interaction. The intent of State of Play is to create a respectful, professional, and insightful dialogue within a group of serious interested parties. Games are serious business – not simply the largest moving part of the entertainment economy, but a form of expression where emotionally impactful stories are told throughout communities that grow and bond, and an important educational tool. We take play seriously here, and the goal of this article is to seriously analyze the serious business of gaming.
Of the many fields upon which the console wars are fought, and of the many points of consideration upon which purchasing decisions are made, it cannot be said that backwards compatibility is regarded as foremost in importance. It is far from the sexiest selling point, or the flashiest. In the heated arguments of message-boards and basement couches it is a feature rarely mentioned, and the ramifications of its absence is often overlooked by both parent and child when birthday and Christmas wishlists are lovingly prepared and frantically acquired.
Given their actions over the last 14 months, Sony and Microsoft are counting quite heavily on the above. Neither Microsoft’s XBOX division nor Sony’s PlayStation corps have paid more than lip service towards providing backwards compatibility, and it is the interest of neither to provide it. In this week’s State of Play, we’ll be taking a quick look at the history and role of backwards compatibility in the industry, the current attitude and motivations of the major players with regard to same, and what we can reasonably expect in the future.
The Background of Backwards Compatibility
Backwards compatibility is – within the confines of the interactive entertainment industry – the ability of a gaming platform to support software from the previous generation(s). This feature is a relatively recent one, and has been present on a relatively few platforms. Its prevalence has increased in recent years, presumably due to the increase in the number of consoles with similar or identical storage media. And its popularity has increased in equal measure with the recent upswing in popularity of de-makes and nostalgia titles, the coming-of-age of the second and third generation raised on interactive entertainment, and the consequential growing variety in the population of gamers.
The history of backwards compatibility is somewhat brief, due to the fact that the generational life-span of a console – and certainly a succession of consoles – is often longer than the viability of a storage medium. As an example, the early days of gaming were dominated by the cartridge, and without exception those cartridges were proprietary and the rapid advances in technology yielded ever larger and better options – as such, there wasn’t really much in the way of possibility for backwards compatibility until the advent of the disk-based systems (with some forgettable exceptions).
The introduction of optical media (CDs/DVDs etc.) pivotally changed the nature of the game. Suddenly systems were capable of delivering an astounding amount of content with incredible fidelity, and along with that came many other advantages, among them the ability to play your favorite CDs or DVDs with a system, the ability to upload your favorite music to your console, and the almost infinite longevity of data that optical media brings to the table. The adoption of optical media as the format of choice for all the major consoles also created a line of continuity between the systems that had never before existed – while a CD is not a DVD is not a Blu-Ray, they share almost everything in common in terms of structure, proportion and principle.
While it is highly unlikely that creating this continuity was foremost in intention, its advantages were certainly universally seized upon. One of the major concerns in replacing any piece of media hardware is the consequential loss of access to the platform’s library. There’s no question that tons of us simply couldn’t wait to get our sweaty little palms on Tekken Tag Tournament or Call of Duty 2 but the thought of giving up Final Fantasy VII or Halo 2 to do so would have been just too much to bear. Those platforms, Microsoft’s XBOX 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 2, weren’t the first consoles to provides backwards compatibility, but they (along with the Nintendo Wii, DS and 3DS) are excellent examples of backwards compatibility done right. They provided simple and universal access to the previous generation of software without fuss, effort, or fees and that’s just what a console needs to do to assuage the concerns of early adopters and loyal fans alike. As the manufacturers of those platforms make up the Big 3 of the industry and furthermore have provided that functionality so well and for so long, I think the gaming public began to regard backwards compatibility as a given, something that we could safely assume would be present in all future consoles.
The Status Quo
Which brings us to the crux of the issue: backwards compatibility in the current generation of gaming consoles is conspicuously absent. Furthermore, it doesn’t look to be in the cards Neither Microsoft or Sony offer a true solution in that vein, and that has gotten under the skin of the gaming public in a big, big way. Microsoft, after one of the most infamous PR gaffes in the history of the industry, has done nothing but pay lip service to the matter. And Sony’s response, the wildly over-sold and under-delivered PlayStation Now is nothing more than a bewilderingly over-priced rental service with an embarrassingly poor selection of software. And that is current state of affairs: one manufacturer makes empty promises that they’re ‘looking into it,’ and the other gesticulates wildly with one hand at their ‘solution,’ while the other hand reaches for your wallet. Both of these responses to the issue of backwards compatibility have created a great deal of irritation in the gaming public as a whole.
The Bottom Line
So if the public reaction to a lack of backwards compatibility is so universally negative, why not simply provide a better solution? Why not update the consoles to provide 100% backwards compatibility? The answer – and no surprise here – is money.
There is a cost to creating and including the extra hard-and-software required for backwards compatibility, both physical and in man-hours. The operating systems and hardware in successor consoles are often pivotally different in critical ways, and that necessitates either an emulator be created or the software be ported and almost always both are required. All of this adds to the research and manufacturing costs for the console, and that cost must then be shouldered by the company as a loss, or passed on to the consumer by increasing the unit cost of the console, or deemed unnecessary and scrapped as a feature. In the case of the current generation of consoles, the manufacturers both settled on the third option – this likely due to Sony’s negative experience with the high price-point of the PlayStation 3, and Microsoft’s unwillingness to further increase the cost of their already steep $500 platform.
In addition to the obvious factors of manufacturing cost and price point, there is the most lucrative motivation of all: profit. Both of the major manufacturers have two current consoles in the market, both of them still have first-party published titles in development, and both can benefit greatly from giving gamers a reason to own both of their current platforms. In short, no one ever got rich giving people a reason to buy less of their products. Similarly, the recent upswing in HD-remakes such as Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Metro: Last Light, and Tomb Raider have created an opportunity to repackage an ‘older’ experience and charge for it, rather than simply provide the user with the ability to play the last console generation’s copy.
Given the lackluster economic situation over the last two years coupled with the inherent competitive nature of the industry, neither company can be blamed for finding ways to minimize the costs of their products. The issues highlighted above give us some insight into their more self-interested motivations, but with a deeper look into the details of the issue, the decision to scrap Backwards Compatibility starts to make a frightening amount of sense.
The Realities of Backwards Compatibility
Sony’s PlayStation 3 initially launched at a then staggering $499 and $599 and early inside reports indicated this brutal price point was still selling at a loss to the manufacturer. The console’s lackluster performance in its first few years may be attributed to several factors but foremost among them was the massive differential in price paired with the negligible advantage in performance. Sony, reeling from a slow start and facing an ever-widening sales gap had to find a way to make their platform more appealing, and decided to address the prime issue of price point. To that end, they assessed a combination of end-user surveys and usage statistics that yielded some rather startling results: less than 10% of users utilized the backwards compatible features of their consoles and that relatively small percentage did so less than 10% of the time.
This rather pointed statistic resulted in the removal of backwards compatibility in all subsequent PlayStation 3 units and, assuming the veracity of the numbers reported by Sony, it seems a logical and justified action. Now, I myself am inherently skeptical of any findings that are reported without disclosure of supporting evidence, especially when those findings are in the best interest of the reporting party.
But stumbling across this report gave me pause. I am staunchly in favor of backwards compatibility. I refuse to buy anything that won’t provide a reasonable return for my dollar, and so I tend to seek out quality titles that are lengthy with a great deal of replayability. I will happily drop 500-plus hours into a game if I enjoy it, and I form serious nostalgic attachments to games. I associate them with periods in my life and people, and I really enjoy revisiting them. So, logically, all of those facts and qualities implies that I, if anyone, would be one of the parties most likely to really utilize backwards compatibility.
The startling realization I had is that … I haven’t, really. I thought back over every platform I have access to that is capable of backwards compatibility and I came to the conclusion that we think we use it, and we think we’re going to use it, far more than we actually do. Sure, I nabbed a copy of Final Fantasy VII off of eBay and that made its way into my PS2 and PS3, and Halo 2 fairly lived in my 360 until the third installment arrived. But I cannot say that I or, frankly, anyone I know has spent anywhere close to more than 10% of their time with a backwards compatible console using it for that purpose. In fact, I found two universal common characteristics in everyone I spoke to about the subject: everyone is in favor of it, and hardly ever uses it. And under that light, the numbers reported by Sony and their subsequent choice, made sense.
And moreover, so do the choices made by Microsoft and Sony with regard to backwards compatibility for this generation.
The Exceptions
There are two groups to whom I have as yet paid no attention: The Nintendo Faithful, and the PC Master Race. Let me first apologize profusely and secondly assure you I number myself among both. I have yet to address either the Nintendo platforms and the PC platform for the same reason: it wouldn’t be fair. We’re not allowed into this little party, because it would ruin the curve.
The chain of compatibility from GameBoy to GBColor to GameBoy Advance to DS to DS Lite to 3ds line is the best effort in the history of the industry. The Wii U is the only current-generation console to offer backwards compatibility. The aforementioned motivations and concerns of the industry aren’t factors that magically don’t apply to Nintendo, so what makes them an exception?
Nintendo, firstly, views itself as a toy company. They play in a different league from Microsoft and Sony, and this shows in the end result. The Nintendo platforms have never focused on competing graphically but rather on the end-user experience. As such, they prioritize accessibility, local multi-player, broad appeal, and for lack of a better term, fun. Their titles are intended to be enjoyed by many, and for a long time. Nintendo has consequently made backwards compatibility a priority in almost all of their systems. Nintendo has historically made a strong commitment to developing successor platforms with similar architecture to their predecessor, and this has eased the complications and rigors of emulation. The smaller degree of variance in hardware capability between generations further eases these issues, and the lower production costs make the choice of paying for backwards compatibility in each console easier to swallow. In this as in all things, Nintendo follows its own path; backwards compatibility is a better fit and certainly more of a priority for Big N than the other major players.
I will not waste words with regard to the PC on this subject. It is, simply put, the only platform that does and always will offer 100% compatibility between hardware units. If it’s a PC title, and if your system meets the requirements, you can play it and that’s all there is to it. That simple fact is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to the PC. I don’t have to worry as to whether or not my favorite titles will be supported on the next platform because there never truly is a next platform. The closest analogue to a console generation is the next release of an operating system, and the greatest hassle you’ll have to endure in that eventuality is selecting which compatibility mode to run the title in.
The Future
Given the realities of the gaming industry, it would be hard to imagine that the attitude of the major players will change in any significant way. Sony will likely turn a profit on PlayStation Now, though it’s genuinely hard to imagine it being more than marginally successful without massive changes in library or pricing. Microsoft will continue to smile and make promises they have no intention to keep . But thankfully, Nintendo will continue to march to the beat of their silly but charming little drum and the PC will always be … well … the PC.