why do you think console devs have forsaken backwards compatibility?

I mean, I guess Nintendo still does it a bit (the Wii U can play Wii games, and the 3DS can play DS games), but other console devs seem to have forsaken the practice..

I remember the original DS was backwards compatible all the way back to the Original Gameboy, my PS2 was backwards compatible with my PS1 games, my XBOX 360 was backwards compatible with Many Original XBox games, and the early PS3s were backwards compatible (and then the later versions were not)..

To Me Backwards Compatibility is a major selling point to buy a console, however it seems most devs have decided its not worth their effort..



what is your opinion on Backwards compatibility?

Sweet filthy lucre.

Different CPU architectures. Nintendo has used the POWER architecture for some time, so it's not as big of an issue. The early PS3s had the PS2 hardware built-in. That was later removed and backwards compatibility was removed as well. The Xbox One and PS4 use the x86 architecture. The PS3 used the Cell while the Xbox 360 used POWER. They'd need to emulate it via software and, on the limited resources consoles have already, there's the issue of performance.

I guess that consoles have become too complex for backwards compatibility to be worth the extra cost. It was probably a lot easier for the PS2 to emulate the PS1 than it would be for the PS4 to emulate the PS3.

Also, with consoles having their own digital stores now, they'd rather sell you older games again than let you play the ones you already have.

Honestly? These days I just don't care about it. I've heard many different takes on it, and I believe there is the case to be made that if you want your hardware moving forward, that at some point you're going to have to leave the old software behind. I can only play most of my old PC games through an emulator, for instance (and perhaps there's a point to be made in integrating some sort of emulation into a console, I don't know.)

Myself, though - I still have my old consoles if I really get the itch to play Sonic 2 again or something. But for the most part I've played all the old games to death, I sometimes think I want to revisit them but I can only play the original X-Com for so long before I decide that really I'd just rather either switch back to the new XCom or wait for Xenonauts to come out...

I guess devs find it cheaper to make a console that's not backwards compatibility then it is to make it backwards compatibility, also I think they do that so people won't play last gen games on the current systems. Some game companies just don't like their gamers playing outdated games.

Sometimes it's not worth the effort. If there's a fairly drastic change to the architecture, it simply may not be possible to make things backwards compatible. I'm not sure if that's the case with the new consoles, but it wouldn't surprise me. They're quite different from their predecessors after all.

Not having it is either stupid or brilliant.

My first thought was stupid, because it has to cut hard into early sales. Until there are enough new games to make it worthwhile the incentive to rush out and buy the new console just isn't there.

My second thought was that since consoles in the past have had huge customer satisfaction problems over lack of availability when they were first released maybe that's a good thing. I think they are probably still selling them as fast as they can comfortably make them.

And let's face facts, there will be games that are worth re-releasing in 'new console updated' form because people will buy them again. So no reverse compatibility equals more money.

Emulating console hardware would be difficult and performance would be terrible. Porting (recoding the application to work with the new architecture) the game over is easier. Many last gen console games are already ported over to PC or vice versa. They have plenty of experience in doing this. Since PCs and the next gen consoles (PS4 and XBOX1) are x86 based, they only have to tweak the code to work better with the hardware.

At a wild guess, how many million more copies would a Skyrim for XBox 1/PS4 sell? Just as one example.

Digital downloads.

The consoles gotten more complex and need noticeably more powerful hardware to be emulated when different architectures are involved.

You need approximately 10x the processing power to emulate the system you want to emulate, although it varies greatly depending on how optimized the code is. Also, emulation is a fairly linear process, you can't really split it well into multiple cores. So having a PS4 with 8 relatively weak cores is kinda bad for emulation compared to two really fast cores. Especially with the PS3 as I reckon it's pure hell to emulate at full speed because of the Cell SPEs even on the most powerful Intel CPUs currently out.

Because of these struggles, there been a lot of PS2 HD ports for the PS3 during this generation, and I assume it will continue with the PS4.

I want it. I would love to see proper software PS2 emulation in the PS4, similiar to the software PS1 emulation in the PS3, although I'm not quite sure if the PS4 is up to properly do it. But there are a lot of advantages that way with virtual memory cards, wireless controls, using a digital HDMI cable instead of an anologue cable for better display and so on.

It would have been cool if the PS4 had a expansion slot or something too where you could plug in a "PS3 card", as the PS4 is way too weak for software emulation there (and USB doesn't have enough bandwidth for that sort of thing).

If I had a DVD player that couldn't play a CD or Bluray that couldn't play a DVD I'd be upset. If the PS3 did play PSX and PS2 games I'd be more likely to buy one that is for sure.

The PS3 can do software emulation of PS2 games, so I imagine the more powerful PS4 would be able to as well. I don't think they'd ever implement that though, since it's more profitable to sell the games as "classics".

The PS3 can't emulate all PS2 games though, and most PS2 games available on PSN are relatively simple too.

And the cores in the PS4 isn't that much faster than the main core in the PS3. There are just more of them. But emulation isn't suitable for multiple cores. So as far as emulation goes, they are about the same.