But... But I want it! :(

More ports because ports and are better than old games. Why would I want to slide the ugly piece of shit of PS3 TLOU when I can have the remastered version with the eye cancer taken out?

Zero care. I have a 360. I have a PS3.

Ever since I noticed how badly Xenogears and Final Fantasy VII ran on a PS2 (this had native PS1 hardware emulation mind you, the IOP in the PS2 is essentially a PS1  on a chip with a native PS1 boot mode when a PS1 disc is used) I've always preferred native hardware. I even play my SNES games on a Sony PVM RGB monitor.

BC is a neat parlor trick and gimmick, and I applaud the effort, but native hardware ftw for me.

They had no BC on PS3 (most of the time) and it didn't hurt them one bit. Why should they waste money on this?

It would be perfectly possible to build a PS3 emulator, you just need a lot of time, a lot of money and some seriously skilled programmers. You would have to use a shitload of GPGPU to emulate the SPE units, but that is really the main issue. It should be no problem to emulate the graphics chip of the PS3.

About PS Now, the infrastructure for that service is expensive as hell. That's also why the prices aren't so cheap as many would like them to be. No way they are letting millions of users play free of charge, they would have to build another 2 or 3 server farms for that. At the very least.

Just keep your PS3 and everything's fine.

They might wait to see if it makes a big difference in sales and take it from there. They will never get backwards compatibility locally though. The psn now idea isn't bad but that's not designed to be backwards compatibility.

didn't Microsoft use the exact same "it's technically impossible" argument on backwards compatibility that Sony is using when the X One launched?

I still don't get why people are glorifying backwards compatibility. It really doesn't matter. "But Nintendo" - But Nintendo has effectively kept 0% of the consumer base they gained with the Wii. Not even offering access to the full Wii library did anything major for the Wii U. Granted, I know plenty of people bought the Wii U specifically because it was backwards compatible and convenient, but that clearly made up a very, very, very small number of people that wouldn't have already bought the system, backwards compatibility or not.

Look at the PS3 and 360: the PS3 flailed due to price when it had full backwards compatibility, and became a rising star the moment they ditched PS2 compatibility for a lower pricetag. The 360 only had some very minor, barebones backwards compatibility, and few people ever really cared. The system still sold just fine.

Look at the PS4: it has sold amazingly well, and literally nobody raised almost any fuss about backwards compatibility until suddenly Microsoft decided they could pull it off on the One. Now all of a sudden backwards compatibility is this major system seller, as everybody forgets the Wii U could do it from day one and has seen no obvious sales benefit from it.

Like somebody mentioned, ultimately, backwards compatibility is only really important at the beginning of a system's life. It helps early sales by getting people to trade up on the idea that they aren't losing access to their old library while waiting for the new one to become a little fuller. Once your system is closing in on two years old, it generally should have a respectable enough library that backwards compatibility isn't necessary to try to make the system an appealing prospect. After nearly two years, a system should have a good enough library both out and incoming to stand on its own without having to be held up by the predecessor.

Yes judging by the amount of people here and other sites like gaf, there sure seems to be sizable a interest in having native BC compatibility in all of the consoles. Even sony admits this, but said that most do not use it and so they said it is not something they will pursue. For the main reason that the TC stated, the focus on PS now.

Looking deeper into it, around 2 years ago Mark Cerny made this statement:

    “Backwards compatibility, particularly in Japan, is something that is strongly brought frequently, so we thought long and hard about this. Realistically, to support backwards compatibility with PS3, the CELL Broadband Engine would have needed to been part of the new console. Currently, it’s not possible to simulate this via software. If CELL were the only requirement, that wouldn’t have been much of an issue.”

    “We would also need to support the supporting hardware indefinitely. We can freely manufacture CELL if the decision is made that it is needed. However, that’s not the case with supporting hardware. There are parts which will become difficult to obtain since 7 years is already considered to be long in the IT industry…”

Link: http://www.thegamersdrop.com/2013/04/10/ps4-cerny-and-ito-talk-about-backward-compatibility-and-x86-architecture/

Which seems to suggests that the Cell could be emulated by the PS4, but when you factor in everything else like (GPU OS overhead) it would be too much for the PS4.

But this was 2 years ago, maybe now they could try something like game specific profiles.

Good thread.

Look at all the downplaying.

I can honestly care less if my PS4 never has backwards compatibility.