Sorry if this has been answered before.Basically I couldn't find any info on it. I know that the PS4 and Xbone don't have backwards compatability in regards to playing discs but what happens to the digital games bought on them?I fail to believe that technically they can't be played on the new consoles as let's be honest here eventually they will be available to buy and play just like the older games have been. I.e the HD collections. So will our games carry over or will it be likely we have to pay again? If so then anyone else think it is a bit of a con? I mean they are supposedly now using more PC like technology and you can play your PC games no matter how you change your system.

From what I've read they will not. I think it's stupid as well, but understandable.

However it's inexcusable that most of the indie games won't work.

It isn't a matter of faith, they'd have to be rewritten to work on ps4 and xbox one. And your PC's architecture doesn't change when you upgrade or buy a new one.

No they can not play any past games you own on either system. The could at least let you play your downloaded games since the account is carried over but they say no. They really want you to hang on to your 360 and ps3.

Thanks to gaikai all ps games can be played on ps4. And with the cloud the one has I am sure they could play all 360 over the cloud. So no excuse. They are just being greedy.

That's different, you're just receiving the image and audio, your console isn't running the game.

It's like saying sony is greedy because you can stream PS4 games to your Vita, but you can't run them using your Vita only.

Yeah this is one of the pains that consoles bring, if you change the architecture the games that were optimized for, programmed in places at the Machine/Hardware level, the new system will not be able to play on the future system. Unless you do what Nintendo does and either keep a similar architecture (ie Gamecube, Wii and WiiU all use nearly the same architecture) or put the entire system on a chip (GBA to DS, DS to 3DS).

The reason most PC games can continue to play when you upgrade is that games made for the PC are programed at the OS level, so changing Hardware has little effect on them.

For those who wonder what the levels are:

A computer system can be viewed as a pile of departments, with three-to-four primary departments:

1. Machine - coded in Assembly or binary - currently only Human Interface (controller) and pieces of the Audio (if there is no DSP) are programmed this low.
2. Hardware - coded using the hardware manufacture's code for the code. In consoles the Video, AI, Audio (if there is a DSP), threading, core and memory optimization are done here. In PC games some develoepers will strike a deal with Graphics card manufactures and optimize at this level.
3. OS - The OS and its APIs are located this high, almost all PC games never stray deeper than this.
4. Software - Games programmed in HTML5, Flash, Java and other scritping languages. Games that run in emulators are running at this level. So almost all web and mobile games are programmed at this level

And the OS level can be separated into departments also. The more levels between the Machine and Software level the easier it is to code for. Windows is historically unstable because to make Windows to run with as many configurations as possible there are a ton of departments that sometime conflict with each other. And as I said most games made for windows only are programmed to talk to the Windows program and the DirectX API, some of the smaller games only deal with the DirectX API, which is a level in itself.

The PC use to have compatiblity problems before (u)PnP and OpenGL/DirectX was introduced. They had to be programmed at the Hardware level since Windows had limited ability to interact with the Graphics card. So it stunted the game market on PCs for a long time since you didn't have a universal set up.

The upside of optimsation is the code runs faster, you can squeaze more power out of the hardware and make it do things that it wasn't orginally designed for etc, but you curse it to that specfic hardware configuration. 

On the other side of the coin, the higher level the program is made to interact with the smaller the code has to be, and the less complex the code can be, or the game will be unplayable on the interface level. (ie High level of lag etc)
Sorry if I got off the beaten trail with that one.

You must buy them all over again or else

for the same reason a ps3 game can't run on a ps4 without some rewrittng,..  a ps3 game can't run on a cloud server (aka PC) without rework as well.  this is why sony said gaikai will support "a selection of favorites with more support over time". 

i'm hoping that gaikai honors digitally purchased titles but to be frank,.. most of my digitally purchased titles won't even be on the service for a very long time if ever.

That is one reason another is copy rights, etc, can be a tangled mess. You can just unilatterly decide to put a game on the service even if you foot the bill for the rewrite. You need premission from the owner of the IP and that can get messy, that is why Nintendo can not just realease its entire software liberary, sometimes the owner is different in the different markets and they usually want to get paid for use of the IP. And sometimes the owner of the IP isn't clear. And overtime developers go under and the IPs are used to pay off debts and then scuttled so the owner cannot be found. (But you can be sure if a hardware owner decides to release it the owner will pop out of the wood work asking for more money then it is worth.)