I've just been doing a little storage space cleanup on my Xbox Series S today, removing some bits and pieces I just don't have the time for at the moment and installing one or two older titles that I fancy dipping back into sometime this week. And, once again it struck me that backwards compatibility is just so important to me when it comes to Xbox these days, particularly the fairly chunky 360 library.
I obviously have an old 360 lying around somewhere, but digging it out and hooking it back up is just a bit of a pain in my current setup - and the back compat experience is that good on Xbox Series that I honestly don't want to. One of those older titles I'm going to get back to soon is Gears of War 2 following a recent playthrough of Gears Reloaded - and playing through the sequel at 4K/60FPS on modern Xbox consoles is just a much better experience than on native hardware. I can't wait to jump in.
Another thing this little SSD re-shuffle reminded me of is the fact that a huge chunk of my currently-installed list is from that 360 library. At the time of writing, about half of my downloaded games are Xbox 360 titles, and it's just so nice having access to them so easily on current-gen hardware. The fact their installs are small is also a lovely bonus - I can get about eight 360 games installed for an average AAA Series X|S game these days!
Right at the tail end of last year, we looked back on it almost being a decade since Xbox's genius back compat program launched - and now we've passed that 10-year mark, and I'm still loving the feature to this day. Having instant access to a huge 7th generation library is something only Xbox can provide in the console space right now, and it's still adding so much value to my Series X|S experience in 2025. I can only thank Phil for spearheading that initiative way back when!