PS4 doesn't need BC. It's a waste of money.

@zackeroni,

PS2 is the best selling console of all time. The PS4 is in track to be the best selling console of the current generation but it won't reach the 155 million number like PS2.

As for the competition, yes it is doing extremely well compared to the Xbox, although the Switch has had a very strong start and topping sales every weeks since release. Nice to see the competition keeping Sony on its toes.

what the hell has happened to the gaming community lol. i really really want ps5 to be back compat with ps4 so i can keep my digital library but it looks like that isn't going to happen to all you ps4 fanboys it doesn't matter if you don't want it, plenty of other people including myself do want it so stop ruining it for use just because of your stupid corporate loyalty. it doesn't mean xbox is better than ps4 or vice versa, it's just a FREE feature so stop acting like children and just admit its a good option to have a very consumer friendly for all of us

If you people want to play those old ps1 and ps2 games so bad use those emulaters. I just kept my old ps1 and ps2 consoles. You can buy the consoles used super cheap on the aftermarket if you want to play those old games. I think he is right.

If it's not important then Sony needs to shut down the costly PSNow.

@TheCommentator

The PS3 was launched in the NTSC regions (ie. USA, Japan .. etc) with all the PS2 hardware built in that is why you have almost 100% backward compatibility. On the other hand, the launch PS3 in the PAL regions (ie. UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand .. etc) only had partial PS2 hardware with the rest being done with software emulation which at best could only give 85% to 90% backward compatibility. Guess which PS3 I have and it still works?

As for Microsoft's XBox360 well we should not mention the RRoD or maybe the fact that the original XBox360 did not have hard disk drive support (later on you could get an expensive add-on) while the PS3 allowed the owner to swap hard disks without voiding the warranty from day one.

Backward compatibility is a great value add feature and does make a new release console attractive to owners of a previous generation console, however prior to the launch of the PS4 and XB1 both Sony and Microsoft said that their respective consoles would not support backward compatibility. It wasn't until two years after the launch of the XB1 that Microsoft brought in limited BC in that you need your game disk to be able to download the XB1 compatible XBox360 game and you need that game disk to authenticate playing that game.

Basically, if you don't have that particular XBox360 game you either 1) Pay for the game (new or second hand), 2) Pay for a digital download if one exists. It's actually a pity that Sony did not do this but that is what I kept my original FAT PS3 for and since I purchased a PS4 (over 18 months ago) I have hardly played my PS3 (predominately used by my wife for Netflix) and I have a reasonably large (well over 100 games) PS1 (all PS3's play the disks), PS2 and PS3 library.

As for Microsoft catering to the demands of consumers all I can say as I roll on the floor laughing is "Windows 10 genuine spyware edition".

WTF? That €600 price tag above all else was due to the cell and the blu ray drive. The cell that was a failure for Sony and devs and the blu ray drive that was not needed last gen considering that most multiplatform games were superior on the console that had a DVD9 drive. The emotion engine cost a whopping $27 to produce. That's $7 more than 1 month subscription for PS now and that is a price I would gladly play for the ability to play GOW2 or MGS3 on my phat PS3. I would NEVER pay a cent to stream games.

Also, imo, journalists and gamers had the right to criticize that €600 price tag considering that the PS3 was being outperformed left, right and center by a console that cost € 200 less than the PS3.

"feature which isn't doing anything for them. "

It's for the gamers and me being a gamer and not a shareholder, I appreciate their effort in providing something that their costumers asked for.

"The entitlement and stupidity surrounding this topic is astounding."

Imo what is astounding to me is the corporate apologism especially when it comes from people that call themselves gamers. What kind of gamer says no or doesn't want BC in their platform of choice? Because Sony says so?

Main reason ps3 was so expensive was from the cell and also they accomplished BC by actually putting ps2 hardware into the system, that's why it was so big, but it was breaking ps3's. I worked at gamestop for a couple years and the original ps3's would break very very easily. They should have gone with emulation, would have been cheaper and better. Plus cost came from the stupid blu ray that they didn't need, since blu ray tech was new.

@TheCommentator

Yeah, the same way they did with the PS2, and the only way that makes BC actually legal without going through an emulation option which requires publisher approval, which is the way that MS does it. MS doesn't actually have BC, they have emulation, which is a solution which takes the place of BC. The Vita does the same thing with PSP games, although it does have the PS1 chip in the system.

Sony had almost 100% BC compatibility in those early models through their inclusion of the hardware. It's about as good as it gets, because you didn't have to think about it, or be disappointed that the system didn't support a game.

I'm aware they removed hardware to save on cost, but looks at why they had to save on cost. They were being attacked relentlessly on the cost of their system, which wasn't all because of the BC chips, and had to compete against the 360 which was doing very well in the market, while Sony was seeing slower than expected sales, while also bleeding money. From a business perspective, if they know that the feature is not that used, it makes sense to cut it, because it means stopping the bleed.

Next paragraph is for @iamalwaysright also

While hindsight is 20/20 with the BR player, or even the CELL, once the system released, it was something that they couldn't go back and cut. As far as the inclusion of the BR player, it actually was good for distributing games. There were games which used the space, but most multi-plats were held back due to the DVD drive in the 360.

I'm not saying that the only reason the price was high was because of the BC HW, but it was one place they could cut to save on cost.

And this gen is no different. Sony wanted to come in at a target price, and they made their console this gen to meet that price. There were reports that they wanted to include a camera, but they felt coming in at that $400 price was more important, so they had to scrap it.

I do like that quote though. I"m wondering where you came by it. I can't seem to find it on google. Maybe it's a paraphrase? Can you link it or cite it?

Also the second quote if you could. I'd like to see the context of both, and who said it.

Are you saying that Sony hasn't added features to their consoles as time goes by? I'd have to disagree. While they may not include every feature that every person wants, they do support their home consoles.

@Erik

It's a minor inconvienance for me because I have to use a different console to play my older games. I'd love to have the feature, and I'm 100% sure that I spend more time playing older games than almost everyone here who goes on about the feature being so awesome. I like the feature itself, and use it where it's available, but it's hardly the end all be all of considerations of if to get a console or not. No one is entitled to BC, and a lot of people are acting like it's a feature that should be included without a 2nd thought, regardless of the business implications involved. While I am more concerned about the consumer side of things, I also understand that business has to do it's thing to remain in business, so I'm willing to give some, instead of just taking because I feel it's my right to have something.

@Meka

You're assuming that full emulation was possible back then. Even Sony's efforts into this after removing the PS2 hardware came up short, and full emulation was spotty at best. Same reason MS eventually gave up on the feature last gen for the OGXbox.

@nitus10 - yeah playing the SNES on a flat screen looks really weird. Definitely need an old CRT just for this thing. But I will make do for now :P

@ImGumbyDammit

That's what I said in less detail.

I'm not sure why you are calling me out the only PS3's that I know of that had any problems were due to emulation errors not overheating. The original full BC PS3's have around 99% compatibility. And that 1% is a very few games that play fine but have small errors at certain points in in games.

And unless you can find some credible information stating that emulation caused over heating in any model of PS3 I am going to continue to say that was made up B.S.

PS2 BC looked absolutely terrible upscaled to HD... PS3 is already HD so looks far nicer. I'd definitely use PS3 BC on PS4... I mean, shit, it's no wonder games like FFX and KH got remastered for PS3, they hardly even looked playable because of the upscaling. PS4>PS3 BC wouldn't have that issue.

Also, used PS2>PS1 BC all the time and I'm sure everyone else did so this is a really crap argument.

@psycho

No, it was because those chips cost money. The PS2 chip didn't overheat. By the time the PS3 released, the chip was so small that it generated almost no heat. The later versions of the PS2 didn't even have a fan in them, and the ones before that the fan only ran on occassion.

The reason they were cut is because Sony was being bombarded by criticism on the price of the console, and they were bleeding money on every system sold due to selling it at the largest loss of any console of all time. They had to cut costs to remain competative.

The most obvious cut was the BC chips, because as Sony had stated on multiple occassions before the PS3 was released, BC is not a feature that is used by a significant portion of the user base. Basically, everyone had to pay for the feature regardless of if they wanted.....similar to having to pay for Kinect with the launch X1 even if you cared nothing for it. Same way MS cut the Kinect because they needed to drop the price to remain competative. It was a feature that wasn't really utilized, so it was the obvious thing to cut....and in some ways, about the only thing that could be cut beyond reduced costs of parts to manufacture.

If people wanted BC to continue on PS4, they should have not been so criticial of console costs in the past. We had a fully featured console in the past, and it hurt Sony. Why, from a business perspective, given that the feature doesn't have high demand, would Sony compromise it's competitiveness for such a marginal feature? Sony didn't even include a camera in the PS4 like they wanted because they wanted the price to remain competative. Why would they include expensive chips like the CELL, including the RSX whose code isn't directly compatible with the more standard GPU's in modern systems?

I have never once read any report that the chip overheated. The CELL chip could if it had poor thermal compound on the heat sink, but that is the only issue of overheating ever reported on PS3.

darthv726h ago
The change from hardware bc to software was rather quick (within the first year i believe) and done to cut cost. Not because it wasnt used or unsuccessful.

In fact it wasnt until their next revision that reduced cost further is when units really started to move.
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Er no. PS 2 used the PS 1s r3000 chip to oversee the new MIPS R5900, which was a 128 bit custom chip made out of 2x 64bit supercalar to produce the Emotion Engine

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The CPU core is a two-way superscalar in-order RISC processor. Based on the MIPS R5900, it implements the MIPS-III instruction set architecture (ISA) and much of MIPS-IV, in addition to a custom instruction set developed by Sony which operated on 128-bit wide groups of either 32-bit, 16-bit, or 8-bit integers in single instruction multiple data (SIMD) fashion (i.e. four 32-bit integers could be added to four others using a single instruction).

Instructions defined include: add, subtract, multiply, divide, min/max, shift, logical, leading-zero count, 128-bit load/store and 256-bit to 128-bit funnel shift i
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n addition to some not described by Sony for competitive reasons.
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Contrary to some misconceptions, these SIMD capabilities did not amount to the processor being "128-bit", as neither the memory addresses nor the integers themselves were 128-bit, only the shared SIMD/integer registers. For comparison, 128-bit wide registers and SIMD instructions had been present in the 32-bit x86 architecture since 1999, with the introduction of SSE. However the internal data paths were 128bit wide, and its processors were capable of operating on 4x32bit quantities in parallel in single registers.
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Basically in was a Quad [4x32bit] Core Duo [2x chips]

The Cell was basically a 64 bit PPC, overlooking 8x SPEs which were basically Emotion engines running @ 4.8Ghz in local cache or 3.2Ghz in main RAM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

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So basically because they wanted to sell systems to be competitive they made some sacrifices. BC was among them and its sad more people missed out on a convenient feature.

Had they kept it... who knows. Maybe ps4 would have full if not partial bc unlike the current situation.
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No chance, the PS 2/ 3 used emulation, not this crappy drib/drab of a few games per month.. PS 3 also upscaled the games to 1080p as it did with DVDs, using checkerboard but PS 3 owners only complained that this game didn't have this feature or the sound warbled on that game.. Which meant teams were being dragged back off making 1st party exclusives to work on the emulation. As Sony don't own the copyrights to all the games, these clowns were asking the impossible.. So they just dumped it, as MS did last gen with their drip-drip b/c.

There is no way a x86 processor running @ 1.8ghz could emulate the cell running @ 3.2Ghz and no way Sony could have put a Cell in the PS 4 and keep the size down

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Then again, they did buy gaikai with the intention of delivering older games to other things.

@tyasia0
No psychometer is right, I worked at gamestop during the ps3 and the launch of ps4. We had tons of returns for original ps3's that no longer worked. Like he said it was breaking the systems because it wasn't emulation there was an actual ps2 in the damn thing, that's why it was so big.