What changed between last gen and this gen that consoles could play any disc from previous gen, but now they never will again?
Anybody know how Sony pulled off licensing issues when they had the entire PS1 library back compat on the PS2, that goes for the first PS3 model too with the built in PS2.
How did they get a green light to let all these games be played on a new platform entirely without hitting licensing issues?
These days I'm guessing what stops Microsoft from just allowing lots more BC games is because of licensing. Or cold they have slapped a 360 hardware board inside the Xbox One and just got away with it?
Sony didn't have to deal with licensing issues and whatnot for PS1 backwards compatibility because they weren't redistributing PS1 games. They were playing directly off of the disc, which means no publisher consent is required for anything. Microsoft's solution for Xbox 360 support necessitates downloading the entire game, for which the disc only acts as a license for the end user. Since MS is technically redistributing the game, they need the go-ahead from the publishers, and any licensing agreements with the original game must still be in order, since technically these are new releases from a legal standpoint.
As for "what changed", it's not that anything in specific changed, it's that inherently just about everything with BC is case-by-case. You can't really cross-compare implementations from different consoles from different generations for playback on further different consoles, because everything is different. In the case of PS1 playback, it's relatively trivial to create a reliably accurate emulator that will support most/all titles, especially on a console 2 generations removed. Meanwhile Xbox 360 emulation is orders of magnitude more complex (most people,
knowledgeable people, didn't believe it was physically
possible to emulate 360 on X1) and requires numerous per-game enhancements to the emulator. They have emulation down perfectly on a few hundred games now, but the remaining games are likely to have varying degrees of issues. Hence why they need to stick with the staggered roll-out approach, to ensure no one's encountering potentially severe emulation issues.
Now, when in comes to why MS's implementation requires the entire games to be redistributed, instead of blacklisting unsupported titles (or rather whitelisting supported titles, as they did with OG Xbox on 360), I could only guess, since I'm not really aware of what's going on behind the scenes, but it could be the nature of how Xbox 360 software interacts with the OS and how on 360 (I believe) there were abstraction layers between the game software and the hardware that necessitates the software being packaged with the emulator in a very specific way. Again though, that's a guess.
And yes, MS could throw the Xbox 360 hardware into an Xbox One, but that would add a good bit of cost and complexity (and likely size) to the console, and thus would be unlikely to happen.
(plus, unless they added in a 360 SoC and played the games off of that, they'd likely run worse than they do now on BC, unless they were to increase the clock speed as well)
You're forgetting nintendo did it every single gen until they changed formats for Switch, and they had games from every major publisher involved there
I don't buy that there is a licensing issue that requires them to get permission to play physical last gen games on current consoles
I think this seems like a Digital issue only and that there's no real reason Scorpio couldn't play any Xbox Original disc or that Xbox 4 couldn't play every 360 disc.
Nintendo didn't do it every single gen. The SNES, N64, and GameCube all lacked backwards compatibility, and the Wii U lacks GameCube support despite hardware capable of it.
Nintendo's BC implementations are different anyway. In most cases their BC support was a side-effect of their hardware, as they've always had full hardware-based backwards compatibility, with no emulation, just proper native playback. That is because the GCN, Wii, and Wii U all use custom PowerPC processors, each built off of their predecessor, meaning the hardware is inherently compatible (which is why a modded Wii U can play any GCN game perfectly). Similarly, the GBA, DS, and 3DS all use ARM processors (with the GBA's
exact chip being used as a supplemental processor for the DS). The GBA is a bit of a unique case for Nintendo, as its GB/GBC compatibility necessitate the inclusion of their custom Z80 chip (the GB micro dropped this chip to cut down the size and cost, hence why it does not support playback of those games).
The reason the Switch isn't compatible with the Wii U isn't purely due the switch to game cards, as that wouldn't inherently prevent playback of
digital games, but largely because Nintendo finally dropped their line of custom PowerPC chips they had been using since the GCN and moved over to a Tegra X1 SoC. Granted, even if the hardware were naturally compatible they'd still have to come up with a solution for the GamePad, and the Switch was intended to be a hard break from the Wii/Wii U anyway, so it's not necessarily likely they would have tried, but I digress.
Anyway, just like with PS1 playback, the reason Nintendo doesn't have to worry about licensing is because the games are being played back directly from the discs themselves, with no redistribution involved.
