Sony Baffled by XB1 Backwards Compatibility - Unlikely to Come to PS4

[sXeth]

Well you see, Sony, the 360 wasn't engineered by eldritch horrors, so it's probably very similar to the xbone, hardware wise.

Really shouldn't have outsourced that PS3 design to incomprehensible beings of unspeakable intent.

Yeah, X360 and Xbone are basically just low end PCs with a locked proprietary (but windows based, or fairly similar) OS. Its just like running a game from XP on Windows 7, a few compatibility problems to sort out (hence the limited list of working titles), but nothing major.

PS3 had its whole weird internal workings, which gave it more (potential) power, albeit rarely used outside of first party. But PS4 went back to standard(ish) PC setups rather then simply being a soup up of the PS3 architecture.

Though I'm not sure why Sony can't make a downloadable emulator app for PSX/2 games for the PS4.

All in all, the backwards compatibility rage is one of those vocal minority issues. Since achievement stats started showing up in full force, we know most people don't even finish games completely once, nevermind more.

 

[Something Amyss]

Honestly, while it's a neat little side-deal, the list of games gives me little to think positively about. And Sony might be shocked, but this isn't a true backwards compatibility deal. They could probably do the same thing, with the digital download deal. Honestly, I doubt MS would be doing this if they weren't making up for their massive bout of hubris in launching a weaker, costlier console with a spycam and always-online that "couldn't be turned off."

This is them eating crow because they got smacked down by the consumer base.

I don't get why backward compatibility is such a big deal, I mean it's cool, but it overshadow game announcement?

There's a certain benefit to not having to have fifteen consoles plugged in. However, it seems like a step back at a point the Xbone should actually be standing on its own. It's sort of like saying "screw it, we don't have anything worth it. Here's your old games."

I also don't trust Microsoft to follow through. Once the 360 was popular, BC updates became slower and covered fewer games. I only had a handful of OXB titles, but I still managed to have ones that couldn't be run. I'd rather keep my 360.

Well you see, Sony, the 360 wasn't engineered by eldritch horrors, so it's probably very similar to the xbone, hardware wise.

Really shouldn't have outsourced that PS3 design to incomprehensible beings of unspeakable intent.

It's not so much that it's similar, it's just that it's more similar than the alien architecture of R'lyeh. Xbox compatibility requires effort and power. PS3 compatibility requires another eldritch pact, and virgin souls don't come cheap.

Though it's my understanding this isn't true BC and more of a porting tactic.

Er...pretty sure Sony WON that war, BluRay IS the standard now. And arguably it was a much more important long-term battle to fight given the importance of formats. >_>

Might have meant previous format wars. Sony's been on the losing end of a lot of them.

Though winning might not be the best thing here. I know they couldn't predict Netflix, but....

To be fair most of them games are over 10 years old or close to it. And they would look horrible. Most of them probably need remastering or something.

Doesn't stop them from selling PS1/2 games on the Playstation store. Hell, the best thing about the Vita is instant access to PS1 titles in a handheld.

That "full list" linked, only has 21 games listed.

It's incomplete as far as the final release, but the current list from the preview program.

 

[Something Amyss]

It's funny really ... when Xbox One was first announced, people hated it with a passion because of Microsoft's desire to put poor business practices on the darn thing. Everyone cheered and adored the PS4 for what it was, along the selling price at that.

Funny, perhaps, but hardly surprising. The guys in second and third place are generally the ones who step up their game. Hopefully Sony responds. It's always better when there's actual competition.

Captcha: Spell this backwards: rirrom.

I see what you did there, captcha.

 

[bluegate]

I get it. The PS3 is apparently made in such a way that it is a beast, and thus probably not worth the effort to make it so those games work on the PS4. I'm not happy about that, but I get it.

So what's the excuse for PS2 and PlayStation games then? Because I still have a lot of those, and I would love to be able to play them without going through a mess of cables and dust just to hook up my PS2 again.

Depending on what models you have, luckily you can hook up all the PS consoles with just 3 cables; power cable, hdmi and the scart output thingamajig. But that doesn't mean jack shit when you have the slim PS2 and a fat PS3, sorry about that.

As for the topic itself, I hope that people are able to disconnect the things that Yoshida says from the things that Sony says as a company. As for the backwards compatibility, good on those people with an Xbox One, I guess.

 

[Shocksplicer]

Ports, they are ports XbOne is not Backwards compatible.

So, didn't read the article then?

 

[Kingjackl]

This announcement was the first thing that made me regret going with the PS4 over the Xbox One. I get why backwards compatability can't be done on the PS4, but I hope they can eventually compensate by porting some of the old games onto the store like they did with the PS2.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I wouldn't put too much faith into Xbone emulator. Microsoft wanted to do the same with Xbox 360 and then they gave up. It's very possible that they simply announced this to try to sell some consoles because of their abysmal sales compared to the PS4. Don't count on some miraculous emulator that will run all the Xbox 360 games.

This announcement was the first thing that made me regret going with the PS4 over the Xbox One.

And this is how it works. You drop the emulator bomb, you wait for sales to increase and then after 20 or so games you give up on it because now you have a large enough player base that you don't need to do any more work.

 

[gigastar]

Microsoft plays the long game...

Ah, so thats why that launched a console with a pitiful 4GB RAM and announced it with always online DRM despite the stigma against it being plain as day everywhere on the inernet, and made it require a Kinect to function at a time when the NSA's dealings with Microsoft were coming to light.

Obviously, plans we simple folk dont understand.

Ports, they are ports XbOne is not Backwards compatible.

So, didn't read the article then?

No, hes right. Simply being backward compatible would mean dropping a 360 disc in the tray and playing normally.

In this case, your disc is used to verify that you own the game and then the game is downloaded to your system. What youre actually getting is a ported version.

True back compatibility would also mean all titles available at the start.

 

[cikame]

I'm assuming they're making a universal 360 emulator for Xbone then working further to make each game run better on it, which explains the game support being rolled out over time. If you've ever used a PS2 emulator on PC you know how no one setting makes all games work or work well, it's quite an effort to develop this but in the end this might be cheaper than Sony's massive expensive backwards compatibility cloud mess, better for consumers anyway.

 

[loa]

360 to xbone isn't a huge leap in architecture so apparently all it takes is a few fixes to make the games run on an xbone.
Why does nobody think of ps2 or ps1 emulation though? That's very possible and the ps2 library is still one of the best.
They could release that on the ps4 to show their willingness to do *something* but I guess that just makes too much sense for "lets remove soft BC from the ps3" sony which does the equivalent of standing there going "d'oh, me no know what happening".

I wouldn't put too much faith into Xbone emulator. Microsoft wanted to do the same with Xbox 360 and then they gave up.

Works good enough to play conkers bad fur day, panzer dragoon orta and any other game I'd want to play for me.
At least they didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater like sony did when things didn't work *perfectly*.

 

[DEAD34345]

360 to xbone isn't a huge leap in architecture so apparently all it takes is a few fixes to make the games run on an xbone.
Why does nobody think of ps2 or ps1 emulation though? That's very possible and the ps2 library is still one of the best.
They could release that on the ps4 to show their willingness to do *something* but I guess that just makes too much sense for "lets remove soft BC from the ps3" sony which does the equivalent of standing there going "d'oh, me no know what happening".

I wouldn't put too much faith into Xbone emulator. Microsoft wanted to do the same with Xbox 360 and then they gave up.

Works good enough to play conkers bad fur day, panzer dragoon orta and any other game I'd want to play for me.
At least they didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater like sony did when things didn't work *perfectly*.

I have a lot of original Xbox games, and very very few of them ended up working at all on the 360. Of the few that did, many had horrible performance issues and glitches. Maybe you were lucky and the games you liked happened to be the ones that were ported properly, but that certainly isn't my experience. Microsoft did throw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to supporting OXB games on the 360, they promised everything, half assed support for a few games, and then quietly dropped the whole thing.

I expect nothing less this time around, given that they seem to be repeating their last efforts almost word for word so far.

OT: Sony defeated themselves with their own hubris when they intentionally designed the PS3 to be arcane and difficult to port from, and they're still suffering the after effects of that decision to this day. Lucky for them their main competition is so incompetent that they're likely to screw up the backwards compatibility anyway, like they did last generation.

Besides, they've already missed the best time to be backwards compatible. If the Xbox One had been backwards compatible from the start then they might have converted some PS3 players by having a huge availably library of games to play while the next gen games were thin on the ground.

 

[P-89 Scorpion]

Well you see, Sony, the 360 wasn't engineered by eldritch horrors, so it's probably very similar to the xbone, hardware wise.

Really shouldn't have outsourced that PS3 design to incomprehensible beings of unspeakable intent.

The 360 chip is based on the core of the PS3 CELL, IBM sold it too Microsoft even though Sony had paid for it to be developed.

 

[dochmbi]

No way to say it otherwise. Microsoft plays the long game, Sony spent a lot of money making BluRay a standard over HD DVD. Well Sony you finally got your wish after losing the format wars,

Er...pretty sure Sony WON that war, BluRay IS the standard now. And arguably it was a much more important long-term battle to fight given the importance of formats. >_>

No, Netflix won the format war.

 

[loa]

I have a lot of original Xbox games, and very very few of them ended up working at all on the 360. Of the few that did, many had horrible performance issues and glitches. Maybe you were lucky and the games you liked happened to be the ones that were ported properly, but that certainly isn't my experience. Microsoft did throw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to supporting OXB games on the 360, they promised everything, half assed support for a few games, and then quietly dropped the whole thing.

I expect nothing less this time around, given that they seem to be repeating their last efforts almost word for word so far.

They didn't patch it out so nobody can use what's there I mean.
Maybe I was lucky and panzer dragoon orta, conkers bad fur day and true crime happen to work really well.
That's all I play from my rather small xbox library and I didn't experience anything like, say, the stuff you get when trying to emulate ps2 games on a pc.

If this was sony, they'd just patch that away entirely and I'm glad they didn't.
As for their promises, I don't base my decisions on a single word microsoft says.
They have proven time and time again that they can't be trusted at all with their overblown marketing campaigns and so have many other players in this industry.

IMO you lose nothing of value if you ignore what they say and just pay attention to what they do.

 

[LTD]

Personally, I think this is great news. I purchased dozens of titles digitally, which means I can't trade or sell them like I would have in generations past. I still have a "Falcon" model 360 that won't live forever. So rather than see that investment disappear completely, I can now carry them forward. While its true that I won't spend hundreds of hours playing those games in the future, at least I know they're available should I want to, and I don't have to re-purchase for another system.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Yeah, X360 and Xbone are basically just low end PCs with a locked proprietary (but windows based, or fairly similar) OS. Its just like running a game from XP on Windows 7, a few compatibility problems to sort out (hence the limited list of working titles), but nothing major.

A brief correction, the X360 was not a low end PC. The original Xbox was X86, using a custom Pentium III chip. The XBox One is also X86, using a octa-core AMD chip. The 360 however used a PowerPC processor, the same as the Motorola variety that powered Apple Macs for years (until they switched to X86 themselves).

As such, there is no reason original XBox games couldn't work on an Xbox One with little to no work needed since they use the same architecture, which is in effect as described, a low end PC. The 360 however is too different and cannot be emulated by current X86 hardware nor with software emulation. The only way it could happen is if MS had included what is in effect a functional 360 in some form in the same physical box/motherboard, as the original PS3 did with it's predecessors and (I believe, but may be mistaken) the Wii did with the Gamecube.

The backwards compatibility MS are implementing here isn't really backwards compatibility in the technical sense. They are rebuilding games that they published for X86 architecture, and putting them on live. When a "compatible" 360 game is inserted into the One, it downloads the X86 version and runs that. To give an analogy, it's like trying to open a Word document in Notepad. It doesn't work. But they are re-reopening the document in Word, saving it as Plain Text and that *will* work in Notepad.

 

[Lightspeaker]

No way to say it otherwise. Microsoft plays the long game, Sony spent a lot of money making BluRay a standard over HD DVD. Well Sony you finally got your wish after losing the format wars,

Er...pretty sure Sony WON that war, BluRay IS the standard now. And arguably it was a much more important long-term battle to fight given the importance of formats. >_>

No, Netflix won the format war.

Netflix doesn't have the same broad content base as DVD used to or Blu Ray does so...

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

No way to say it otherwise. Microsoft plays the long game, Sony spent a lot of money making BluRay a standard over HD DVD. Well Sony you finally got your wish after losing the format wars,

Er...pretty sure Sony WON that war, BluRay IS the standard now. And arguably it was a much more important long-term battle to fight given the importance of formats. >_>

I meant that they lost the other format wars up until BluRay. BetaMax, UMD, etc. Sony's been attempting to make a format standard for 30+ years, only succeeding with BluRay.
They lost more money on that than they'll ever really gain back IMO.

 

[Mahha]

yup the cell processor will be incredibly hard to emulate. Fairly sure the PS4 also doesn't have the power to just power through that problem

Pretty much. I mean as far as architectures go Xbone and 350 are a way more similar than the PS3 and PS4. Hell, PS4 is probably more similar to xboxes than it is to PS3.