XBox 360-to-One Trade Up Offer

Post Reply New Topic

I see where one can trade-in certain XBox 360's for a $175 credit toward a XBone. With XBone's offered at about $350, that could be quite a good deal.

I dislike losing the old box and access to older games, but with the promised backwards compatibility maybe that is less of an issue.

I was leaning toward a PS-4 when I choose to go next-gen; but this trade-up credit is making me rethink that.

Any thoughts on my quandary?

I've been in the same quandry myself, I still have not come to decision.

If you got a XBox360 and want to still have acess to old games, more so for exclusive games, then it's better to keep your old consoles rather than selling it under some promises of software backward compatibility. The XBox One is not powerful enough to properly emulate XBox 360 games, not without a lot of hacks and potential bugs. Also, even though they promised it there is no guarantee that all 360 games will be compatible, as they will inevitably stumble on licensing issues and obscure little know games won't have a lot of attention which could leave them really buggy.

It's better to wait for the PS4 and the XBox One to get better hard drives anyway, as 500GB is far from enough for those consoles.

People hear "backwards compatibility" and automatically assume it means that it's going to be compatible with everything from that era, but that's not really how it works.

If you look more into Microsoft's announcement, what they've said is that it'll be backwards compatible by the holidays.... with about 100 games. As in, compatible JUST with those 100.

When there's over 1000 actual games, in physical form, on the 360. More like 1300, I think. The number is on Wikipedia. So that means well less than 10% of games are actually going to be supported when this service begins. And whether or not they'll be supported WELL is another matter.

As it is, MS has been asking what games people most want to see done on there, which... yeah. That just goes along with the "not many will work with this" idea.

I wouldnt go for it, if I were you. Just keep what you have, and if you want an XBone, just save up for it rather than trade everything in and regret it later.

It's also worth noting that 360 peripherals/controllers will NOT be compatible, so no Guitar Hero, no DJ Hero, no Rock Band, no 360 versions of Skylanders....and saves can only be transferred via the cloud, which not all 360 games support

So in other words, what they ACTUALLY mean is "We're going to almost add a little bit of backwards compatibility sorta maybe.... not really.... but we can offer you some false hope, so buy it, we're hungry for your money!"

Thanks for the input!

My prior experiences have taught me to be leery of claims about backwards compatibility, and most of all about any sort of emulator.

Yeah, I think I will decline to fall for this one.

Xbox One...More like Xbox Zero.

Microsoft says it is up to the developer and publisher to allow their titles to be part of backwards compatibility.

Secondly for the next few days you get a free game download of your choosing with the purchase of an Xbox One.

The specifics of it dont actually matter; all that matters is that the list is very small, and not likely to get that much bigger anytime soon. Eventually, maybe. But not soon, and there's no guarantee that any one specific game will end up on there. People might trade in their 360 only to find that, even later on, a few of their favorite games arent set for the compatibility, thus entirely denying them the ability to play those games at all since they dont have the 360 anymore.

Besides, the tech part of it IS very difficult to do. That's not something I pull out of nowhere, that bit. That's been told to me by an actual developer and explained a bit. There's alot of work involved in getting any given game compatible with this type of emulation, and likely more cost than most people would think. Many devs/publishers already have a ton on their plates, and wont be putting this one on there. For some, it's a very risky idea. I expect though that the largest ones with the most resources (and with 360 games that have very high sales that easily warrant this) will be putting them out without trouble.

Emulation can be a bit strange at times too; expect occaisional screwball problems with it. Though hopefully for them they'll find ways to iron those out and do it without the problems.

All in all, if they had the ENTIRE list, or the vast majority of it, available for emulation, then it might be worth a go.... IF you can find enough actual Xbox One games you want to warrant actually doing it; if you cant, there's no reason to not just stick with the old one. For now though.... either "dont do it at all" or "wait on it awhile and give it time to expand a bunch" are the best bits of advice.

Cant say I know much about the XBone's own game selection, but I hear it's pretty lacking currently, like that of the PS4. Though I guess that depends on the player. Of course, the things havent been out THAT long, so....


And this suddenly has me thinking of older consoles in general. Now I have the urge to have a go at some of them. Provided I can get them hooked up through the giant spiderweb of cables that hangs down the front of what passes for a desk here. And I just noticed that the 360's power brick (as I call it) is completely embedded in that mess. Ugh. Probably not using that particular console for awhile right now, dont have the patience to somehow get that out of there currently.

Actually Microsoft built the emulator which essentially acts as a "wrapper" for 360 games allowing you to play them natively on Xbox One even from the discs without tweaking the original code.
Microsoft is doing the work here and all the developers and publishers have to do is give their consent and Microsoft essentially will add the necessary code to it to make it run.
Of course you will get better performance if the developer rewrites the necessary parts of the code to work better with Xbox One hardware.

"Wrapping" is how EA's PC games work on OS X, allowing them to release both versions of the game on one disc at the same time.
This is done because it is much cheaper and quicker than porting the game code to a platform (you have to rewrite parts of the code).
In the case of EA's games on OS X, there is very little performance difference.
Though games from Maxis such as Simcity 2013 are native ports optimized for OS X with OS X code.

In the case of Simcity 4 you have to use a wrapper called WINE to run NAM and other code altering mods on OS X.
WINE is also used to run other programs on OS X instead of porting them.

Wrapping is so much cheaper and quicker than updating and porting code.

Like I said, none of this was just me pulling it out of the air. I'm going off of what I've been told directly by the developers I've dealt with (this being recently, not like, months ago), so.... *shrug*. If they've got their stuff wrong... that's pretty darned silly. Possible giggling is warranted, then. It actually would be pretty darned funny.

Either way though, it's simply not going to happen very quickly, wrapper or no wrapper. Something I've seen before in similar situations is that the publishers can get a little strange about this sort of thing, wether they have to do much of anything or not. Though that's hardly the only problem facing them from the non-tech side.

Maybe wait to see what games are supported? Even the 360's backwards compatibility doesn't support every XBox game.

Just reading through these concerns, as well as my own experiences of getting bitten in the butt by emulators, makes me conclude that, for the $175 trade-in value, it ain't worth it.

This reminds me a bit of what the industry went through when MS/PC DOS arrived on the scene in the early 80's. There was much hand-wringing about whether DOS would catch on given the large embedded base of CPM applications for personal computers. There were talks about CPM emulators for DOS machines, and DEC even developed and sold a dual-CPU machine that could run both OS's. (It was branded the "DEC Rainbow"; I owned one of those weird ducks.) Obviously these backward compatibility concerns very soon became moot.