Microsoft now warns Xbox One owners against backward-compatibility hoax

Microsoft’s Larry Hryb (aka Major Nelson) has warned owners and users against following a step-by-step tutorial to making your Xbox One backwards compatible. The guide, making the rounds on social media, promises to let gamers to run older titles, but it can lead to bricking the console instead.

Neither the Xbox One or the PlayStation 4 are backwards-compatible and cannot be used to play previous generation games, no matter how much tweaking or reconfiguring you might attempt. The six-step tutorial passed around Facebook and Twitter actually opens the Developer Mode of the Xbox One and fixes it in a constant reboot cycle.

The origin of the prank isn’t clear, but the tutorial image proudly announces that “Xbox 360 games will now be playable on your console.” Larry Hryb, part of the Xbox One development team, took to Twitter to tell users: “To be clear there is no way to make your Xbox One backwards compatible and performing steps to attempt this could make your console inoperable.”

As we’ve previously reported, anyone can access the developer tools on Microsoft’s new games console with a little bit of work. Microsoft has made it possible for any console to be turned into a developer unit without paying out extra for hardware — all that will be required when the feature goes live is a license fee and authorization code.

It’s not clear if any users have been duped by the Xbox One backwards-compatibility hoax, but it’s possible that less tech-savvy gamers could be caught out if they catch sight of the official-looking guide. A similar image scam convinced some users that the iOS 7 upgrade made their phones waterproof back in September.

Read more: digitaltrends