Sony Responds to Xbox One Backward Compatibility News

One of the biggest pieces of news out of E3 this year came from Microsoft on Monday morning, when the company announced Xbox One backward compatibility support for Xbox 360 titles. Now, Sony executive Shuhei Yoshida has responded to the news, calling it “interesting,” and stating that the company has no immediate plans to offer native backward compatibility on PlayStation 4.

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“The technology involved must be very challenging,” Yoshida said in an interview with Polygon.

Xbox One backward compatibility is available now for Xbox Preview members, and will roll out to everyone this holiday. At that time, the initial list of supported games will be expanded to “hundreds” of digital and physical Xbox 360 games. System-wide Xbox One features, such as DVR and streaming, will be available for all Xbox 360 games.

The PS4 does offer some kind of backward compatibility by way of PlayStation Now. However, this is a paid streaming service. But could the PS4 ever offer a native backward compatibility solution?

“I don’t think we will change our approach,” Yoshida said. “The PlayStation 4 doesn’t have backward compatibility.”

He went on to say that Sony will instead focus on building new features and services for the PS4. But Sony hasn’t ruled out native backward compatibility entirely.

“Backward compatibility is hard,” Yoshida explained. “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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