Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can now access sixteen games that run with backwards compatibility… from the cloud!

It’s intriguing to see what Sony does (closing the PlayStation Store for the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation Vita, and the PSP), compared to Nintendo (they just killed access and availability for Super Mario Bros. 35 and Super Mario 3D All-Stars, respectively) or Microsoft. You might have a few bad words about the Redmond-based company, but Microsoft has no competition when it comes to supporting older games.

They announced that the backwards compatibility has been extended to xCloud, available for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. In other words, they can play the following titles on a tablet or an Android smartphone: Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Double Dragon Neon, Fable II, Fallout: New Vegas, Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3, Gears of War: Judgment, Jetpac Refuelled (touch screen controls enabled), Kameo, Perfect Dark, Perfect Dark Zero, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Viva Piñata (touch screen controls enabled), Viva Piñata: TIP (touch screen controls enabled).

Sure, you could say that it’s not much, but it’s a start. It will be expanded (and we can already see that Bethesda’s games, such as DOOM 3, could pop up here, and that’s an OG Xbox game, remember!), and we can’t see anything of the sort from Sony (although you can stream older games via PlayStation Now, it doesn’t go too many generations back in it…).

„Being able to play your library of games on the device you want is a wonderful promise, be that on console, PC, or on a mobile phone or tablet. I believe it offers real freedom of choice in terms of where you play, but as cloud gaming on mobile grows it’s exciting to think that that might be where someone discovered their first Rare game,” Craig Duncan, the studio head of Rare (who has 7 of the 16 games in this list) said.

He added that they helped to implement the touch controls for the three aforementioned games they made: „We took the lead from the Cloud Gaming team, as they did the implementation and shared with us to play and test. It’s always tricky, as touch is different than a controller and certain games with fewer inputs do lend themselves better to a touch experience than others. Jetpac Refuelled is a good example of fewer inputs, but if touch is the way you as a player want to play any game, we want to make sure it works as well as it can. Of course, we also welcome feedback from our players.”

What can Sony do in response?

Source: WCCFTech