Batman: Return To Arkham - 8 Ways It Proves Remasters Are Totally Ridiculous

3. Backwards Compatibility Should Be Universally Available

call of duty modern warfare remastered
Activision

Anti-consumer business practices aren't alien to the vast majority of gamers. In the past five years alone, we've seen the industry push back against pre-owned games and the trade-in market, through practices like 'online-access' keys, DRM and everything in between. Many see micro-transactions, season passes and pre-order bonuses as a blight on the medium too, but if anything encapsulates the industry's retrograde movements more, it would be the erasure of backwards compatibility.

The Xbox 360 was a fantastic console, and among its greatest achievements was the fact that players could transfer the vast majority of their old library to the console. Over a hundred original Xbox titles would become playable on Microsoft's second stab at the console market, and while it was pretty spectacular to see the company announce the return of this feature for the Xbox One, the library is nowhere near as expansive as it was in the past. In fact, companies can easily subvert the feature altogether, giving rise to farcical announcements like the unveiling of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's remaster, which will only be available to players who invest in a pricey limited edition of the franchise's newest iteration - a cheap imitation of Halo that quite literally no one asked for.

For folks on the PS4, the situation is even more dire. Rather than simply letting people put an old disc in the console and playing straight off the bat, players now have to turn their attention to PS 'Now', a streaming service that charges rentals of old-gen games, and that's only if you have a strong internet connection to boot. Whichever way you look at it, charging audiences for games they already own is bad, and while an argument can be made that you can always pick up your old console if you're feeling that little bit nostalgic, the fact remains that backwards compatibility used to be a common feature of seventh generation hardware.

What reason could possibly be given for its omission now?

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.