How to change the VMware Player version for a virtual machine?

I faced the same issue, What i did was opened the vmx file/VMware Virtual machine configuration file in notepad++ and changed the value of the field "virtualHW.version" to that of the version number of workstaion in which you want to open it in. scenario: I had VMWare Workstation 12 before then i switched to version 8. and changed the virtualHW.version = 12 to virtualHW.version = 8. and it worked flawlessly. peace out! :-p

Thanks to @Rugved Mahamune answer

In addition, if you want to find which version you need to set

virtualHw = "xx"

Just check image below:

credit: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003746