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FloatingWaffles on 18 March 2020
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Hiku said:
FloatingWaffles said:

Plus, I always knew that PS1-PS2-PS3 BC was a pipe dream, i'm not annoyed that I didn't get what I wanted, moreso it's towards Sony's stance on it that it's not even worth looking into and that nobody cares about it. 

What specifically gave you the impression that they didn't even look into it?
They don't report everything they look into to us. What they said was that AMD designed the custom chips with PS4 logic in mind. Can we agree that this by itself is already asking more of AMD than is normally reasonable to focus on?
To quote Cerny: "Achieving this unification of functionality took years of effort by AMD."

My point is that if PS1 - PS3 compatibility were to occur in the future, it's more reasonable to assume that this would be achieved by Sony purely (not AMD), figuring out an emulation solution. And this is still, in theory perhaps possible. But not something they should necessarily waste valuable time and resources from AMD to work on at the development stage of the console. And that's what they were talking about in the presentation. That they have PS4 backwards compatibility logic in place thanks to AMD. And even then, they still need to test every single game before before they can all function properly though. (So that's a lot of work to do just with PS4. Let alone with potentially PS3, PS2 and PS1.)

Microsoft have already found a successful way to emulate their older games since a few years ago, which gives them a head start on that front this time around.
If PS3 games can be successfully emulated even with PS5 remains to be seen due to the notoriously strange architecture of that system. But that's probably something they'd want to focus more on after the console is finalized and launched, as there are a lot more important things to handle in the meantime.

I don't doubt that they cared about PS4 Backwards Compatibility at least, I think they realize how important it will be to carry over the games from this gen given that they are leading in it, but it's just always seemed to me like everything else from PS3 and below they just aren't interested in putting in the work to do so. When we've got people from Sony like Jim Ryan saying "who would want to play this" in regards to old games a few years back and how the only "solution" they've offered for some PS3 games and such is through Streaming in PS Now. It's better than nothing sure, but it's always just come off to me as "we won't do it ourselves, but here you can stream it at least". 

You're right though, maybe they did look into it and we just don't know about it and they do have things they can look at and decide "ok well is it worth putting in the time and effort to do this", after re-reading that Jim Ryan quote he did say a lot of people asked for it and only a few ever used it, but I don't think it doesn't mean they shouldn't ever try, but I realize they're a business first and foremost and will make decisions that way.

I just also don't understand the "taking away resources from other things" logic, because with Microsoft they've been doing BC for years and we've seen the amount of growth they've still been able to achieve in their studios, budget, etc. It's seemingly not taking away much, if anything at all.

We've also even seen increases in games like Black Ops where that blew up in popularity again and hit 70k concurrent players again once it was added to Xbox One BC, so it's definitely not a matter of nobody using it at all. 

Last edited by FloatingWaffles - on 18 March 2020