Sony has no plans to add backwards compatibility says President of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida to Polygon. “I don’t think we will change our approach. The PlayStation 4 doesn’t have backward compatibility.”
Microsoft’s announcement to include backwards compatibility into the Xbox One most certainly caught Sony’s attention. ”The backward compatibility news was interesting,” said Yoshida. ”The technology involved must be very challenging. I’m interested in seeing the list of titles.” But that seems to be the extent of their interest in the subject.
“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.”
Sony does have the PlayStation Now streaming service that lets PS4 users play a selection of PS3 games, but even then Yoshida doesn’t really think of the service in those terms. “…the primary purpose of [PlayStation Now] was to create a new network service that could be used to bring PlayStation games to multiple devices including non-PlayStation devices, like Sony and Samsung televisions. That is an example of our adding and creating new services and initiatives.”
Per usual, Yoshida did not preclude the possibility for backwards compatibility down the road, but the older a console gets the less important features like backwards compatibility become.
