Backwards compatibility on PS4 remains unlikely, according to Sony President

Microsoft’s biggest surprise at E3 came in the form of backwards compatibility for Xbox One, which lets players play their 360 games on the new console.

This move suggests the company is trying to gain back some ground it lost during the current console war and could prove a very effective manoeuvre given the immense popularity of the Xbox 360.

All eyes then turned to Sony to see if the console giant had any plans to offer the same feature on PS4.

Speaking to Polygon, Sony Computer Entertainment’s President of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, said that the announcement by Microsoft was “interesting.”

However, even with the obvious advantage backwards compatibility offers its competitor, it appears that Sony still has no intention introducing it on PS4.
“I don’t think we will change our approach,” Yoshida said. “The PlayStation 4 doesn’t have backward compatibility.”

Instead, Sony remains focused on rolling out its new feature, PlayStation Now, a rental service that will allow players to stream PS3 games to multiple devices, including PS4.

The idea of native backwards compatibility hasn’t been entirely dismissed by Sony though, with Yoshida citing the difficulty implementing such a feature as the reason for its absence.

“Backward compatibility is hard,” Yoshida said. “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.”