Sony didn’t quite reveal everything about its new PS4 last night, so understandably there will be questions. Questions like; “Will you be able to play PS3 games on the PS4?” Unfortunately Sony has now confirmed that you won’t really be able to do that.
Whilst the company promised to do everything it could to bring older PlayStation titles to the new console in digital download form on the PlayStation Store, the PS4 will not be backwards compatible. This means that you won’t be able to buy the new console and slide in your PS3 copy of Black Ops 2 and carry on playing.
Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida confirmed after last night’s big event that the current crop of titles for the PS3 won’t make the jump to the PS4 in their current state.
This means that any games you’ve purchased through the PSN on your current console won’t be transferrable to the PS4, and nor will your saved data, regardless of whether you use the same PSN ID.
Sony promised to try to bring titles from older consoles to the PS4 “in some form”, and to be fair they did this very well with the PS3, launching PS1 and PS2 games through the PS Store.
Yoshida also confirmed that the company has long term plans to offer cloud services for a much bigger library of PlayStation classics, but didn’t confirm when this would be.