One of the apparent BIG features that PS4 gamers have been missing out on is backwards compatibility, and this week we learned that it’s never going to happen. Today, we’ve discovered that Sony seems to have made a very good choice because Xbox gamers, who did get the backwards compatibility feature with the Xbox One, don’t even use the feature!
According to data gathered by Ars Technica, Xbox One users (who did receive backwards compatibility) couldn’t care less about it. They barely play older Xbox games, despite the option being right there in front of them. Apparently, 54.7 percent of Xbox One users time is spent playing Xbox One games, 34.7 percent watching Netflix, and 1.5 percent playing backwards compatible titles. That’s 1.5 percent! While backwards compatibility has an available market, stats such as these indicate a lack of lucrative risk in it.
For us, backwards compatibility has never been an issue. When PS4 came along, we kept our PS3 and revisited it from time to time, along with the PS2, but largely we’ve played PS4 games on the PS4. Even when PlayStation Now came along with the ability to stream older games, we rarely bothered to dive into the stack of older games, because we’ve been too busy enjoying the games given to us during this generation. Here, however, the cost of Now pays for the servers and upkeep of the service, ensuring that it at least maintains itself and ensures a certain level of quality.
Indeed, Jim Ryan, President of Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe (SIEE), recently said that backwards compatibility was one of those much requested PS4 features, “but wasn’t actually used much”. In a recent soundbite, he said: “ I was at a Gran Turismo event recently where they had PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, and the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?"
It’s worth noting that this particular Xbox Live study took data from 900,000 accounts (out of approximately 48 million). Nevertheless, that’s a fairly large pool of people considering we see studies with far fewer being passed as fact. If these stats are to be totally trusted, then it seems unlikely that either Microsoft or Sony will ever consider backwards compatibility again. And it definitely appears like Sony made the right decision to leave it out in the first place.