With three days to go until Sony makes some kind of official first announcement regarding its next PlayStation console rumours have really kicked off. We’ve heard specification speculations and a couple of photo leaks of what many believe is a prototype for the PS4’s controller. Ahead of the February 20th Sony event The Wall Street Journal has now offered some interesting information relating to the backwards compatibility of PS3 titles on the next next gen console.
Since Sony purchased streaming games company Gaikai last year it had been suggested that the PlayStation 4 would move away from ‘physical’ games meaning gamers would be using solely digital content and streaming content. Earlier systems allowed for previous gen discs to run on the current platform (for example PS2 games running on PS3) but advancements on the chip set running the next console will make PS3 discs obsolete.
High street games shops gave a sigh of relief when it was revealed that Sony will not in fact be getting rid of the use of discs but this revelation left current console owners unsure what it meant for their collection when it was said the the AMD x86 chip in the new PlayStation would not run their present discs. This is where The Wall Street Journal suggest Gaikai (previously only a PC games provider) will come in – hosting a massive archive of PS3 (and perhaps earlier) titles which gamers will be able to download onto their brand spanking new console.
This leaves a lot of questions for current PS3 games owners. How would they obtain their existing titles? Would the library be logged by serial numbers for every game ever sold on the PS3 platform? We think this would be painstaking and offputting for the dedicated collector just to get the games he or she already owns.
These may hopefully be questions we get the answers to when Sony breaks the news on the PlayStation 4 this Wednesday and the Gadget Helpline will be following the story.