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Although many people would like to use their PlayStation 3 game discs on their PlayStation 4 game consoles, Sony Computer Entertainment does not have plans to enable backwards compatibility with previous-gen titles.
Initially, neither Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox One nor Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 4 were compatible with games designed for previous-generation game consoles. Last year Sony started to offer select PS3 games on its PlayStation Now cloud streaming service, which means that gamers have to pay for titles they already own. By contrast, Microsoft last week announced plans to make select X360 titles playable on Xbox One natively.
Microsoft’s backwards compatibility approach is a little bit friendlier to customers and naturally makes the company’s new-gen systems more appealing to Xbox 360 owners. Unfortunately, Sony has no intention to follow Microsoft with backwards compatibility initiative. Sony claims that it has better things to do with its software engineers.
“We are just taking two different approaches,” said Jim Ryan, president and chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, in an interview with MCV. “Unfortunately there are just not sufficient enough software engineers in the world for everyone to do everything. Each platform holder has to make their choices, we made one and they made another. Their choice is entirely legitimate, and I think our choice is legitimate, too. In some ways it is quite nice to have points of difference between the two platforms, and people will decide which approach suits them best.”
According to Sony, not a lot of people actually want to play older games, which makes it less tempting for the company to invest in backwards compatibility.
“We have experience of backwards compatibility,” said Mr. Ryan. “The earliest PS3 model was backwards compatible with PS2, and it is a much requested feature, but actually it is not so greatly used.”
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KitGuru Says: If backwards compatibility significantly improves sales of Xbox One, then Sony will have no choice, but to develop something similar. If the move does not help Microsoft’s console, Sony will not invest anything in native backwards compatibility.
I think the boat has been missed for backwards compatibility. At any rate, this is why I game on the PC, hardly ever have to worry about this sort of thing.
Heck, even a PC is “backwards compatible”, thanks to the PCXE emulators. Rumor has it a 360 emulator is soon to be stable.
And the latest consoles use low grade PC components, so that must make it a lot easier to emulate.
Sony are wrong about this. Like they said, BC was much requested, but I don’t know what data they think it’s hardly used. They only need look at the number of PS3 owning PS4 owners that still actively login to their PS3.
Also, they said people don’t play older titles, whist touting PS Now. Bit of a contradiction.
I hope Xbox sales go through the roof and Sony have to implement this. Microsoft did this in an extremely friendly way. Any disc or digital version will work (discs requiring a download, which is fair).
The Xbox 360 emulator is a couple years out yet, theyve only just managed to get the earliest Xbox game running smoothly, they have another few thousand yet.
Its been nearly 2 years since the release of next gen platforms, people on the newer systems really dont care about their old games now. The only ones that do, are those people with the excessive amounts of games stacked up in their wardrobes
You can’t really speak for everyone with next-gen consoles, and given the response at E3 to MC’s announcement, you’re wrong.
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PC all the way! So much more versitile
As usual, the response you’re talking about is from the vocal minority (from which you and are probably part of). The large majority of the consumers are not those who are debating day and night on the internet.
That said, the previous generation was really good in terms of games, and seeing how the current gen as difficulties to deliver the same quality of experience, I can understand how people still owning 360/ps3 doesn’t want to switch to the current gen yet. But when they do, most of them will hardly play old-gen games anymore.
The backward compatibility would have been a great assets in Microsoft’s arsenal during the 1st year, to convince people into buying a X1
Nice sly disses there. I work from home as a programmer, so I’m often at my PC/near my email inbox.
The crowd at E3 loved the announcement. Microsoft will advertise it heavily. Hopefully Sony will be backed into a corner on the issue. The only reason they’re down playing it is to try and promote PS Now. The PS4 is cooler and draws less energy than my “Phat” PS3, so I’d personally love BC, adn it’d give all those who switched to PS4 from 360 the opportunity to hit the preowned bucket and get some of last gen’s gems.
I don’t think Sony will do anything about BC.
For starter, it would be very hard to make PS3 games runs on PS4 considering how different and specific the ps3 architecture is.
And as I said, only a minority of people will complain as most of people don’t buy a new console to play old games.
But I hope it will make publishers rethink their “remasterisation” fever.
Do you know how different PowerPC and x86 is? Microsoft have made that work. Sony designed the Cell CPU themselves, so they know exactly how it works. Microsoft did not design the Xenon CPU in the 360, but again, they’re making it work.
The Cell was not designed by Sony only, Toshiba and IBM were there, and is way more complicated to exploit (as the multi-platform titles shown us).
But the problem doesn’t lies in the CPU alone. The whole architecture is quite different on PS3.
Moreover, the api used by games differs greatly from PS3 to PS4 while it is kind of already backward compatible between DX9 / DX11 (since DX console version is already a low-level api it needs to be patched).
I’m not saying it is impossible, but would be a massive amount of work to get good performances out of it, and frankly, I hardly see how it is a priority for them or for the majority of the market (despite I would like it).
Sony used OpenGL on the PS3 and they use OpenGL on the PS4. The Cell is the only hurdle, and indeed that’s right, Toshiba and IBM had a hand in it too.
You can’t really call this on “the majority of the market” because there’s nothing to quantify that, however gaming journalists have a hard on for the XBO BC news. That is, at least, quite quantifiable haha.
The PS3 support 3 different rendering API : GCM, OpenGL, and PSGL (which is a modified version of OpenGL ES) which was supposed to be the foundation for the next-generations of playstations console.
PS4 supports it’s own, low-level, newly modified version of OpenGL GNM, and it’s high level counter-part (which is available to ease the porting from DX): GNMX.
It is not a simple matter of translation of methods.
It is shown with the PS2/PS3 compatibilty (I’m talking about the consoles without PS2 components).
hacked consoles have shown us the PS2 classics on the PSN are mostly repackaged ISOs, and you can do the same for unavailable games yourself.
But while it is indeed working, it works very (very) badly.
The built-in emulator on the PS3, despite being updated with each FW update, seems to need quite a modification for each new supported title.
As for the quantifying of the market, you can when you compare the number of sales, and the number of people complaining.
Sony abandonned BC early on on PS3, but that didn’t really hinded it’s sales (the sales were poor right from the start).
And you cannot be sure Microsoft won’t do the same as they did on 1st Xbox BC for 360, meaning, stop developping patches once the big (best-sellers) titles were made compatible.
Personnaly, I would like to have PS4 BC, but just know it won’t happen
They dont have to work each game for a thousand hours…
when they get the first game working 100%, the others will work at around 80%, by the seccond games bugfixing its like 98%. As long as they test a broad range of game they will find all their bugs quite quickly.