Here’s Why You Can’t Play Red Dead Redemption On XBox One

Are those of you with XBox Ones and a library of 360 games enjoying the newly added backwards compatibility feature? Well….to put it another way, are those of you with games within the 104-game list (out of over 1000 released games) enjoying it? Curiously, a game called Ms. Splosion Man is fully compatible, yet Red Dead Redemption, one of the 360’s most popular titles, is not. In fact, none of the games Rockstar published on the XBox 360 are backwards compatible with XBox One yet.

Microsoft engineer Richard Irving told Eurogamer it has more to do with the licensing bottleneck than any emulation issue. “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. 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.”

Irving was asked about Red Dead Redemption specifically. “We’re definitely engaged with all of our publisher and developer partners–including Rockstar–on when and how we can [deliver] on that fan feedback.” Translation: they’re not ready to announce anything yet, so it won’t be playable tomorrow.

Whatever problem Rockstar or its parent company Take-Two Interactive are having with Microsoft, let’s hope they can work it out.