Batman: Return To Arkham - 8 Ways It Proves Remasters Are Totally Ridiculous
3. Backwards Compatibility Should Be Universally Available
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?