Sony Exec Talks About PS4 And Backwards Compatibility

As a vet­er­an PlaySta­tion gamer I have pret­ty much accept­ed that I will not get back­wards com­pat­i­bil­i­ty on any PlaySta­tion con­sole I pur­chase. It real­ly sucks that a huge chunk of the great library of games avail­able through out the PlaySta­tion’s his­to­ry are no longer playable on your PlaySta­tion con­sole. Some games got “remas­tered” and sell for at least $40 and oth­ers are avail­able through Sony’s PlaySta­tion Now stream­ing ser­vice, Both options requir­ing you to pur­chase anoth­er copy of the game.

Some old­er PlaySta­tion games are not avail­able to be played on the new con­soles at all.

An exec from Sony seems to have addressed back­wards com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, giv­ing us a look at what Sony’s offi­cial view on the fea­ture. PlaySta­tion Europe’s Jim Ryan talked about back­wards com­pat­i­bil­i­ty in a new inter­view

“When we’ve dabbled with backwards compatibility, I can say it is one of those features that is much requested, but not actually used much,”

I guess I can kind of see where he is com­ing from, Every­one I know, myself includ­ed, used back­wards com­pat­i­bil­i­ty rarely on our launch PS3s. The fea­ture was usu­al­ly only used when I was feel­ing nos­tal­gic or when we were hav­ing a get togeth­er at our place.

“-I was at a Gran Tur­is­mo event recent­ly where they had PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, and the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would any­body play this?”- Sony’s Jim Ryan

I don’t even know what to say about that last com­ment. He seems to have missed the whole point in gamers enjoy­ing old­er games.

Ryan’s com­ments are not the first Sony has made about the miss­ing fea­ture. PlaySta­tion’s Shuhei Yoshi­da said

“Backward compatibility is hard,” 

“I won’t say we’ll never do it, but it’s not an easy thing to do. If it was easy we would have done that.”

It again looks like back­wards com­pat­i­bil­i­ty wont be com­ing to the PS4 any­time soon.