One of Microsoft’s biggest moves during E3 was the announcement that the Xbox One will support Xbox 360 games with backwards compatibility. You own them? You can pop them into the console, download some software and play.
This was massive, and the first thing a lot of gamers thought was, “how is Sony going to answer this?”
They didn’t. They had no snarky video response like they did for borrowing games a few E3s ago. Instead, nothing was even mentioned during their E3 presentation this year. That goes to show that this move by Microsoft was a complete shock.
Sony Worldwide Boss Shuhei Yoshida spoke with Eurogamer about the news. “It was surprising,” Shu offered. “I didn’t think it was possible. There must be lots of engineering effort. They talked about 100 games, but what kind of games will be included? Is it smaller games or big games? We don’t know.”
They really don’t. They also don’t know how they’re going to deal with the news. As for making the PlayStation 4 backwards compatible with the PlayStation 3?
“PS3 is such a unique architecture, and some games made use of SPUs very well…It’s going to be super challenging to do so. I never say never, but we have no plans.”
Basically? Don’t count on it. The PlayStation 3 was a notoriously tough console to develop for thanks to how different its architecture was. The PlayStation 4 is much, much more in line with what you’d see on a PC in terms of architecture. The work to get PS3 games working on the PS4 with emulation might be too enormous to take on.
PlayStation Now is the only option, and that service doesn’t let you play your old games for free. It also relies on streaming. It simply isn’t the same.