Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft has spoken out to praise Microsoft’s decision to add a backwards compatibility solution on Xbox One for Xbox 360 titles.
Speaking during a post-earnings financial call today, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that the Xbox One getting backwards compatibility is “very good news for the industry.”
“It’s good news for gamers that Microsoft was able to work on the compatibility aspect,” the executive explained. “They expect to come with 100 titles quite quickly, so that’s really good news.”
“It will help some of the brands, like Splinter Cell for us, to come to Xbox One, which is great.”
It’s not much of a surprise that Guillemot would be enthusiastic about backwards compatibility in general, as it gives Ubisoft another way to make money from its back-catalog games. To that point, Guillemot said Ubisoft is expecting some short-term revenue from Xbox One backwards compatibility, but more significant revenue will “really come” at the end of the year when the service rolls out to everyone.
Xbox One backwards compatibility is currently only available to Xbox Preview Program members.
Retailer GameStop has also praised Microsoft’s Xbox One backwards compatibility announcement, which may not be much of a surprise, given the obvious upside for a company that sells games.
Microsoft announced Xbox One backward compatibility during the company’s E3 briefing. Since then, we’ve learned the initial list of supported titles and heard what Sony had to say about the announcement. Microsoft is also asking people to weigh in on what games they want to see made backwards-compatible; Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption is currently leading the charge in terms of votes.