Jun 06th 2017 Sony Talks Retro Games

Owning a video game is an investment. You pay for the system, then you pay for the games themselves. The idea is to get as much enjoyment out of the games as you can to maximize their value. That's why when a new system comes along people want it to be able to play the games they've already invested in on it.



When the Playstation 4 and Xbox One came out everyone wanted them to be able to play games from the last console generation. Both companies flat out said no, but eventually Microsoft came around and added games one by one. Sony executive Shuhei Yoshida responded by saying, "Backward compatibility is hard. I won't say we'll never do it, but it's not an easy thing to do. If it was easy we would have done that."



Recently, Sony's head of global sales, Jim Ryan, had an interview with Time. In it he talked about Sony's plans for not just backwards compatibility, but older games in general. As far as backwards compatibility was concerned he pretty much said people always say they want it, but hardly use it when it is implemented. He went on to say, "That, and 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?"



So it's clear that to Sony at least their older games will not be getting any love any time soon, and don't expect any backwards compatibility to be looked at seriously either. However, Playstation does have Playstation Now which lets you stream a variety of Playstation 3 games for a subscription fee. There are also a few Playstation 2 games on the Playstation Store if you don't mind buying the games again. If you want a Playstation 1 game though, you're pretty much out of luck going directly to Sony. They just don't see the value in older games like the NES mini craze.



What do you think? Are older video games worth bringing back, or should companies only focus on the future? Do you think backwards compatibility is worth it would you/do you use it? Let me know what you think by tweeting me @spencerhavens.