The PlayStation 4 does not offer the kind of backwards compatibility support that the Xbox One does, and it sounds like that won't change soon, if comments from a top exec are anything to go on. In a new interview, PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan said backwards compatibility is a much-requested, little-used feature.

"When we've dabbled with backwards compatibility, I can say it is one of those features that is much requested, but not actually used much," Ryan told Time. "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?"

The PS4 plays PS3 games through the streaming service PlayStation Now and PS2 games through the PlayStation Store. However, people need to buy the games again, even if they owned them on the earlier hardware.

By contrast, the Xbox One offers a catalog of more than 300 Xbox 360 games--including Red Dead Redemption and Call of Duty: Black Ops II--that don't require a second purchase.

At E3 2015, where and when Microsoft announced backwards compatibility support for Xbox One, PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida said Sony had no plans to offer a backwards compatibility solution of its own on PS4. "Backward compatibility is hard," Yoshida explained at the time. "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."

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