I see a lot of cynicism in this thread - much of it entirely deserved. However, from a broader perspective, this is undoubtedly a good thing - and not just in terms of "yay, I can play more things on my new console".

Why? Because it goes some way towards mitigating what was looking like a real risk of a "lost generation" of console games.

As older platforms have gone out of circulation, PC emulation has generally been there to keep titles playable. Hell, when my first-gen back-compatible PS3 died on me and I had to replace it with a non-back-compatible slim model, I was able to carry on playing my PS2 games from the original discs via PC emulation.

But there is currently nothing like working emulation of the 360 and PS3 and, given those platforms DRM measures and general hardware eccentricity, it seems reasonable to suppose that we are years, if not decades, from actually seeing it (if we ever do).

Neither 360 nor PS3 hardware was of the highest quality. The early builds of both consoles had high failure rates - legendarily so in the case of the 360 - and while later iterations improved matters somewhat, there's no getting around the fact that they both remained essentially disposable and short-lived devices built as cheaply as possible.

So at some point in the not-too-distant future (within5 years maybe? Certainly within 10) working 360s and PS3s are going to get harder and harder to find. And with no emulation for them, there is a good chance that a good chunk of the (huge) catalogue of games for those platforms is going to end up inaccessible to everybody bar specialist collectors.

Now, a good chunk of the library for both consoles is basically disposable junk anyway. Does it matter massively if a few iterations of Madden and FIFA end up lost to posterity? Not really. In other cases, games are being "rescued" via "HD remasters" for current generation platforms (which can, admittedly, feel like a rip-off), as has happened with The Last of Us and and as will soon happen with Gears of War and Uncharted. In other cases, developers looking to make money from their back-catalogue may put out PC ports. We've seen this rescue a few absolute classics like Valkyria Chronicles, as well as some more... shall we say... eccentric choices like the Hyperdimension Neptunia games.

But that still leaves a lot of games - including those which were subject to exclusivity agreements but didn't sell well enough to merit an HD-remaster - stranded. There are some good and noteworthy games here; Lost Odyssey, Vanquish, Eternal Sonata and so on.

Now, if the Xbox One has back compatibility all of a sudden, that means that we have at least a temporary stay-of-execution on all three of those games I just mentioned. Plus the fact that they're running on PC-like hardware keeps alive the prospect that we might see them running on "proper" PC hardware at some point further down the line. And if you care about preserving an unbroken history of gaming's development, then this matters. If you don't think that keeping that chain intact matters, then just ask the BBC how they feel about all of those Doctor Who episodes they threw into the trash.

Of course, we still have some PS3 exclusives that are essentially marooned; and that Cell architecture is going to render any kind of emulation, whether on general PCs or on current or future Sony console hardware, a bitch. That leaves some excellent games (the PS3-era Ratchet & Clank games were superb and a lot of Japan's output for the latter half of the last console cycle was PS3-exclusive) still stranded. But maybe this step from MS will put some pressure on Sony.

Hopefully, the PC-like architecture of the current generation will make back-compatibility less of an issue going forward, though there are still issues about the extent to which many games are essentially dependent on PSN or XBL network architecture.

Which could well be the salvation of the Xbox One. Back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, cross-platform development was a PITA because the three platforms were so different from each other.

However, the PS2 had an installed base way that was way larger than either of its rivals. So for a lot of small and mid-sized developers, the obvious solution was to develop only for the PS2; it would give you 90% or more of your sales anyway.

I had a friend who worked at a mid-tier developer during that time who worked on a multi-platform game. The irony was that the technical limitations of the PS2 forced compromises all over their game design; features that had to be cut or scaled down and maps whose size had to be reduced. But even though they could have made a better game for the other two platforms, the PS2 version was king, because it was going to rack up most of the sales. Meanwhile, the Gamecube version was way more trouble than it was worth; several game-functions had to be redesigned because of the lack of buttons on the Gamecube controller and that version ended up with a simpler, less flexible and less well balanced combat system as a result. Often forgotten - controller configuration matters as much for ease of porting as what's inside the console itself.

The game did just about well enough to get a sequel. They binned the Cube version and just about decided to keep the Xbox version, though it was a close-run thing. Only the PS2 version made a profit.

Last generation, the PS3 and 360 had broadly similar installed bases. Ok, there were geographic differences; the 360 was ahead in the US while the PS3 was way ahead in Japan. But by and large, both consoles had a roughly similar sized market. So unless you were being paid for exclusivity, you really needed to target both.

This time around, the PS4 is ahead in all markets and sat on at least twice the Xbox One's global installed base. If cross-platform development wasn't easy, then I could see a lot of developers deciding to cut Xbox One versions of their games, even without financial inducement from Sony.

I don't work for easyJet. However, I do work in the aviation sector. EasyJet have a phenomenal safety culture and are among the safest airlines in the world. I see this article as evidence that they are investing money in improving their safety practices.

Almost every first-world airline knows that safety is an area where you don't cut corners. If you're not a state-owned flag-carrier, then a single crash can (and probably will) wipe out your whole business. This goes for the low cost carriers as much as for the legacy airlines.

Your prediction is bollocks, pure and simple.

It's true that the consoles have a good backlog. This is why I still have my PS3 (well, that and it's a better media player than either of the new consoles). And it's true that if you haven't owned a console before and want one you can get lots of cheap games for, the PS3 and 360 are still worth considering.

But that's different to making them viable platforms to target for new games. People who buy new games tend to want to experience that game with the best experience possible (or in some cases, the best experience possible without the cost of a high-end PC). So sales of new games are already proven to be much higher on the current-gen rather than legacy platforms and most major publishers have now dropped PS3/360 support for all but casual and kids' titles.

There's been solid data for over a year now showing that the majority of games sales have shifted away from the PS3/360 and towards the PS4/Xbox One/PC. We've seen plenty of current-gen-only releases do just fine (Witcher 3 just had the most successful launch so far in 2015) and plenty of games which spanned both generations have sold a lot more copies on the newer platforms. Meanwhile, developers/publishers who stuck with the older platforms have paid a commercial price for it - the initial release of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (which was limited to PC, 360 and PS3) bombed commercially and shifted only a fraction of the copies at launch that Borderlands 2 managed.

The last console generation was the longest we've ever seen and there was a clear appetite among both developers and consumers to move on from it quickly. A lot of the money-men preferred to hedge their bets, not least because the installed bases for the PS3 and 360 were so huge. But what happened in practice was fairly predictable. Core gamers - the people who buy a lot of games - moved to the new platforms quickly and shifted their spending to those platforms. While the installed base of the older consoles remained larger, most of that base was made up of occasional and casual gamers, who don't spend a significant portion of their disposable income on gaming.

The caution in betting on the new generation wasn't entirely irrational. The new platform launches in the years leading up to it had not gone well. EA got burned hard by the Vita's launch flop. Ubisoft got burned even harder when they spent a lot of money supporting the Wii-U launch only for the platform to bomb. But with the PS4 and Xbox One, the developers who could get titles to market fairly soon after launch were generally rewarded (even when those games stunk, as with Watch_Dogs).

The PS3 and 360 will rumble on for a while yet. There's still a market on them for casual games - the Skylanders, Zumbas, FIFAs and whatnot. The PS2 continued getting new releases like that until over 2 years after the PS3 launched. But for major launches, there's no longer any point in targeting anything but PS4, Xbox One and PC.

My worry is that this will be another lever for Germany to try to push its insane levels of censorship on the rest of Europe. They've tried before - they had a good push at making German games censorship (in some respects as bad as and in some respects worse than the Australian version) mandatory using the bully-pulpit of their last EU presidency, though thankfully the clock ran out on that particular attempt.

Juncker holds his position thanks to German influence... he has debts to pay.

In theory, I'm in favour of this measure and would like to see geoblocking ended full-stop, not just within the EU. But experience of the EU suggests that defaulting to suspicion of any new initiative is the best approach.

I was going to mod this "funny".

Then I realised it might not actually be parody.

Meh, most AAA publishers and studios stayed as far away from that whole shitstorm as they possibly could; it was a hysterical debate (out of which nobody on either side came out well) that came out of the indie gaming scene and mostly stayed in the indie gaming scene.

I doubt most people who buy and play games even noticed it. And I doubt a single AAA publisher changed their strategy as a result of it. It got a lot of blogs and gaming news sites very upset, generated a handful of fairly well-buried articles in the mainstream press and then the world moved on.

But most people involved on both sides were full-blown narcissists, so they didn't really see things that way.

This is a real shame for those laid off, not least because there are so few other employers in that sector in Australia.

But it's not unexpected. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (BL:TPS) was a commercial flop. Borderlands 2 has done around 10 million sales across all platforms. Prior to the release of the heavily discounted "Handsome Collection" for PS4 and Xbox-One, BL:TPS hadn't even managed a million.

That's partly because the game wasn't as good as Borderlands 2. Reviews and word of mouth were both pretty harsh on it. I've completed it twice. It actually has some decent (if unoriginal) content, but the first 6 hours or so are a miserable trudge.

But it's also because 2k made a big gamble on the PS4 and Xbox-One being commercial failures, and hence the game launched on PS3, 360 and PC. Their gamble was wrong; both of those consoles managed strong sales. Worse, the early-adopters had a huge overlap with "people who buy a lot of games". While the installed base for the PS3 and 360 remains huge, sales for them have largely dried up, outside of Call of Duty and FIFA.

Console transitions are scary for publishers. 2k's bet wasn't entirely unreasonable. The 3DS had a difficult launch, while the Vita and Wii-U basically flopped. The industry saw Ubisoft invest heavily in the Wii-U launch and get burned by it. But of all the major houses, 2k bet most heavily against the PS4 and Xbox-One and their first major release after those consoles launched paid the price.

It was clear that 2k had largely given up on the game. While Borderlands 2 was supported for years post-launch with well-crafted and extensive DLC, BL:TPS was funded to deliver precisely enough DLC to satisfy the contractual requirements of the Season Pass; not an ounce more. Its inclusion so soon after launch in a cut-price compilation was another sure sign that 2k were in damage-limitation mode.

Either they're going to give him an extremely sympathetic portrayal and the film is going to be some kind of "think of the children" moral crusade against games.

Or else they're going to get sued by him. Assuming there's anywhere left that he's still allowed to file suit.

Both equally plausible, I suspect.

I'm paying for 152Mb/s downstream and 12Mb/s upstream with Virgin Media in the UK. That's generally what I get, though it will sometimes dip down to about 140Mb/s in the evening peak.

Reliability is generally ok. I've had a few faults over the last few years, but they've usually sorted them within 24 hours.

The UK's an absolute postcode lottery when it comes to broadband. There are streets less than a mile from me where the highest speed anybody will advertise is 2Mb/s (and this is in London suburbia). Ironically, there's a new-build housing estate put up in the middle of the last decade which just missed out on a round of fibre works and gets worse connections than the much older properties in neighbouring streets.

But I also have a US ISP - Comcast (family has a place in the States that used to be run as a vacation home and is largely just for private use these days). My god you guys are getting the short end of the stick over there. I'm paying more than I pay for my UK connection for what's advertised as an 8Mb/s connection which in reality struggles to provide more than 3Mb/s even off-peak. It's tolerable for a few weeks a year, but I wouldn't be able to live with it - and there are no other options locally, nor are speeds elsewhere in the neighbourhood notably better.

Indeed - but what I'd like to see would be somewhere that does something like a "six-months-on re-review". I suspect that for a few big-name products, impressions of hardware that people have been living with for 6 months will be very different to out-of-the-box impressions.

I shifted to an SSD for my OS and core applications (plus a few disk-speed sensitive games - a fast-growing category) last year. I'd been planning to buy the 500gb 840 EVO, but, by some small miracle, Amazon had a special on the 840 Pro on the weekend I made my purchase, putting its price very close to the EVO, so I bought that instead. The 840 Pro is apparently not affected by this. Phew, bullet dodged.

But it's interesting that the issue is picked up in so few reviews. Indeed, there's a veiled apology for this in an ExtremeTech article about the bug from October. Reviews are generally carried out on the basis of a short but intensive testing period and hence don't pick up serious issues that take a bit of time to show up.

That's obviously been particularly important in this case, due to the specific nature of this bug. But when it comes to expensive bits of hardware like SSDs and high-end graphics cards, I'd be interested in reviews which came out a bit later but gave a better reflection of failure rates and longer-term issues. I've been stung before by buying a well-reviewed graphics card which turned out to have a horrible failure rate over time.

If I were to rank the publicly-accessible online forums I participate in these days, from most civil to least civil, Slashdot would be top of the pack by a long, long way. Seriously, that's how bad it is now.

The unholy trinity of culture wars, console wars and overbearing admins have ruined many other discussion sites that were perfectly good 3 years or so ago.

Your mistake is in using the "classic" definition of "troll" - somebody who sets out to deliberately cause fights on a forum. Trawl through the archives of Slashdot and you will find many instances of this kind of trolling - and yes, the people doing it are often highly literate (and, when they do it right, sometimes very funny with hindsight).

But the term "trolling" has gone political these days and is routinely used to describe any form of online behaviour that the speaker doesn't approve of. So everything from outright criminal behaviour (eg. threats of immediate violence) at one end of the scale through to disagreeing with a forum's established groupthink (however respectfully) at the other.

And yes, it has become a favourite term of the intellectually insecure, whenever they want to shout down an opposing point of view without engaging with it. In fact, conflating those two extremes I mention above under the same term is outright beneficial for the easily offended, as it allows them to group polite dissenters together with the mouth-foaming loons.