This week Microsoft launched the New Xbox One Experience, and in an interview with Major Nelson, Director of Programming, Mike Ybarra gave an idea of when to expect the next up for Xbox One.
Mike revealed that the team are already looking at the the new update, and had a meeting on the 12th November in regards to what to include and when it should release.
Mike said that the release will probably now be in February as they want some stability over the holiday period. He did state he wanted to get it released as soon as they could, but with that we wouldn’t likely see it until February.
We also heard how Backwards Compatibility was made possible:
“Two and a half years ago, our engineering team didn’t think it was possible. We took a set of engineers throughout a lot of experiences at Microsoft, and we asked them… Phil did a great job. He knows that the engineering team likes to be challenged. They like to try to do the impossible.
Phil challenged them, said “spend some time on this and let me know if it really is impossible, or if we can find some solutions somewhere.” About six months into the investigation, a couple of engineers had a breakthrough, and that allowed them to sort of see the light at the end of the tunne and say, “wow, we’re gonna get some momentum now,” and accellerated progress started happening.
A lot of those ideas are patented right now, so we don’t like to go into all the details, because it is very confidential engineering, but it really was that moment, and some people can remember the day in which we got a couple of things working, and some of the games up and runnning. We were like “maybe we can do that.”
Two years later, I think the team is really proud of what they’re doing, and now it’s just a matter of people voting and making sure that publishers know that they want certain games in the program.”
Major Nelson also mentions that even though a game is top of the votes, doesn’t necessarily mean that it will come to BC, its still all down to the publishers and discussions between them and Microsoft. It was also mentioned that discussions are currently going on with publishers to bring games to BC, so that the library can be kepts up to date and more and more games being brought out.
Source: Major Nelson Radio
