Why is the Next Generation Not Backwards Compatible?

   Some of you may have wondered this, even been extremely angry about this (like I was) when you found out that the next generation was not backwards compatible. Well, after I took some time to think about it, I started to understand. So let's start at the beginning of the understanding that I began to have. Why do you think the consoles aren't backwards compatible? Lets thing back to all the series you've ever played, for example, since it's one of the easiest to show for, is the Call of Duty series. When you bought Call of Duty: Ghosts, your goal has become to enjoy that game as much as possible, right? It makes sense, you want to get every bit of enjoyment out of it as you can since you spent a ridiculous amount of money on it yeah? Alright, well consider this. What if you hadn't been able to purchase it? You would still be playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 right now wouldn't you? Or would you really? The thing is, a while back whenever I was playing Black Ops 2 after it had come out, I wanted to go back and play the original Call of Duty: Zombies maps from World at War. Then I wanted to play online since that was the only CoD that I hadn't ever prestiged on because it was so difficult on that game for some reason, plus I LOVED the guns and maps from that one. But the thing is, when I tried to play online, I spent 30 minutes just trying to find a match with at least 4 people in it. The problem was that everyone had moved on to the new games, and not anyone wanted to play the old ones anymore. So let's put this into current perspective. Sony and Microsoft both want their consoles to finish out their 10 year life cycles. (For those that don't know, they've only fully completed about 8-9 years of their life cycles) They say they'll keep releasing content, and good content at that, for a while until finally dropping them to focus fully on the "Next Generation Consoles." Consider the fact that everyone decided to go pick up the next generation consoles, but those few thousand people that can't due to monetary issues. They would go pick up the next Call of Duty, and not be able to play with anyone online, completely ruining their console experience, and possibly making developers decide that it's not worth making the games for that generation anymore. So the PS3 and Xbox 360 would pretty much end their life cycles 1-2 years early, and lose a lot of fans due to their lack of caring for that generation. Now, the consideration that I have with this extends a little farther. There is a possibility that the consoles indeed ARE backwards compatible, though that feature is not yet, what we can call "Unlocked." There is a possibility that a small update later on will be able to allow the consoles to play previous generation disks, especially because both generations used Blu-Ray technology to play back titles. Given this is just a speculation and probably won't happen anyway, there's no reason to fret. Sony has already announced and talked a lot about their Gaikai streaming service that will be launching not to far in the distant future that will allow your PS4 console to play previous generation content including PSOne, PS2, and even PS3 games. This is something I can't wait to see what they do with it and hope that it won't be a huge fee added on to your already subscribed PSPlus.
   Back to what I was originally talking about to just wrap this up. If they allowed the consoles to be backwards compatible, then the games like CoD: Ghosts would lose all the people playing on that console and everyone would be unable to find lobbies to play in and enjoy their old consoles.

   Thanks again for reading, and please continue to feel free to let me know about topics you want to know more about and giving me stuff to argue over or even just talk about with everyone. Furthermore, I may start doing YouTube Vlogs over this topics as well that may go deeper into it, or just provide a faster way to get the information. Let me know what you think about this idea in messages or comments. Thanks and hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving/Black Friday, and find some great deals on Cyber Monday!

Console War News

   Alright, so right out of the gate let's talk about the recent controversy between the Xbox One and the Playstation 4's versions of CoD: Ghosts to run at different resolutions; Xbox One running on Native 720p, upscaled to 1080p while the PS4 runs natively at 1080p. The easiest way to explain this is by talking about the system specs. Unfortunately for Microsoft, their console lacks in power what Sony's does not. Call of Duty: Ghosts was made to run, engine and software, at a certain minimal amount of power. The Xbox One did not have the power to run the incredible cutscenes, or engine, or whatever it is that they couldn't leave out. Due to this, they reduced the native resolution to 720p and upscaled it to 1080p just so that it could compare to the PS4's native 1080p resolution.
   Next I want to compare the launches of the consoles and their numbers.
PS4
-Units Sold in First 24 Hours: 1 Million
-Countries Released in: United States, Canada
-Percentage of Consoles Affected by Hardware Problems: Less than 1%
Xbox One
-Units Sold in First 24 Hours: 1 Million
-Countries Released in: United States, Canada, Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, and New Zealand.
-Percentage of Consoles Affected by Hardware Problems: Low Percentage

I only wish that there were more specific numbers for the Hardware issue affected consoles. Anyhow, as you can see from these results, the Playstation 4 sold just as many consoles as the Xbox One, however, it was only released in 2 countries while the Xbox One was released in 13. Both companies are handling their replacements/repairs of consumers consoles that have issues very well. Although according to a quote from Microsoft, they recommend sending the Xbox One back through Amazon if you ordered there for faster results, and because the console will be replaced instead of just repaired. Begs the question, why would a middleman be the person to talk to about replacing a broken console, and how many consoles did Amazon have left over that they would be able to do this? Previous understandings were that all of the pre-order limits were filled. Was this information falsified, and if so, why?