In a recent interview with Time, Sony's global sales chief Jim Ryan said that, as much as fans claim they want backwards compatibility, it isn't actually used all that much, and this raised a few eyebrows, as many thought backwards compatibility is popular on Xbox One, with games like Red Dead Redemption proving this. Ars Technica has done some Xbox Live number crunching, however, and revealed that not many Xbox One users play older games on their console.
Their analysis used a third-party Application Programming Interface (API) to sample data from almost a million active Xbox One gamertags over five months, starting from September 2016, and found that it was only around 1.5% of the 1.65 billion minutes of usage time that was spent on Xbox 360 titles on the Xbox One. "That translates to an average of just 23.9 minutes per sampled active Xbox One user spent on Xbox 360 games out of 1,526 average minutes of Xbox One usage during the sampling period," Ars Technica explained.
The report also said that the most popular backwards compatible title, Call of Duty: Black Ops, was only played by three or four out of every 1,000 active users, which is surprisingly competitive with some of the most popular Xbox One games. No other backwards compatible games even rank in the top 100 most popular apps on Xbox One in regards to total unique users, however.
What's more is that these numbers seem to align with Microsoft's own report, as in late 2015 they said that Xbox One users had spent nine million hours on backwards compatible games in the feature's first month, but when you look at averages this equates to only a few minutes each for the roughly 19 million Xbox One owners at the time.
What's your view on backwards compatibility?