Microsoft Explains Why Rockstar Games Aren't Backwards Compatible Yet

"It’s really up to publishers to approve it."

Microsoft’s Group Program Manager Richard Irving revealed that publishers have "cut very specific deals" on content, and this is where licensing comes into play.

"After the technological breakthrough that got backwards compatibility working, the next step was to figure out how to license all this content, originally released on Xbox 360, for Xbox One," Irving told Eurogamer. "As you can imagine, publishers have cut very specific deals on some of that content."

"For example Madden – you can imagine how many licenses go into a game with the players, the NFL, sponsors and so on. And there’s over 1000 games at this point on Xbox 360."

"It didn’t seem fair to ask our partners to go off and find licenses for all this Xbox 360 content so what we opted to do instead was to give fans the opportunity to prioritize which games they want [through the voting process]. Then we can re-engage with publishers and ask about specific games and say, ‘please let us know if this is something you can do’. So it’s really up to publishers to approve it."

Irving said some of the content takes longer than others to organize, so not all of the top 50 or 100 games voted on by Xbox fans were included.