With the recent reveals of the successors to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3 video game consoles, the gaming industry was rife with anticipation to know if these latest incarnations would allow users to play old games. Backwards compatibility has been a feature of many video game systems over the past several years. For instance, owners of the original Playstation could insert those discs into their Playstation 2 machines and play those games as if they were running on the older hardware. This function had allowed millions of video game fans to sell, recycle or discard their outdated technology without sacrificing the ability to play their favorite games.

With the move to disc-based media, backwards compatibility had become a standard in the video game industry. However, Microsoft officials recently revealed that the impending Xbox One console will not be designed with this capability. According to TechRadar, Microsoft claimed that architectural changes in the new system’s hardware prevented them from implementing the feature.

Gamers hang on to their current systems
The loss of backwards compatibility is the latest addition to a growing list of reasons why players may decide that they will need to hold on to their current video game consoles. As noted by Joystiq’s Jessica Conditt, the advent of digital services that allow gamers to download games from online servers and store them on their system’s hard drives has also contributed to this emerging trend.

“It’s been eight years since the previous generation transition, meaning players have had longer than ever to build up their libraries,” Conditt wrote. “That’s a lot to lose – and even more so with the onset of downloadable games in the middle of this generation.”

Unless gamers want to lose the ability to play the video game catalogs they have developed in recent years, their Xbox 360s and Playstation 3s will have to remain in rotation. As those machines receive more use down the road, data storage will become an increasing issue for video game aficionados. With more time spent on their consoles, gamers will dedicate more hard drive space to their game and digital downloads. This will prevent them from allocating more space to their other media files, including music, movies and photos. Even after the release of their successors, the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 will remain top-of-the-line purveyors of high-quality media playback, so this storage space shortage will be of great concern to gamers.

To address these concerns, video game players can employ an external hard drive for PS3 or Xbox. With the additional storage space provided by a DIGISTOR External Drive, gamers will be able to back up their entire PS3, providing a durable data recovery option in the event that their internal hard drive fails. For owners of either console, adding an external storage solution will free up space on their internal drives for additional game, movie and music files well into the next decade.