Sony has No Plans for PS4 Backward Compatibility

The PlayStation 4 will probably never offer backward compatibility, Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida has told Eurogamer.

"PS3 is such a unique architecture, and some games made use of SPUs very well," Yoshida commented. "It's going to be super challenging to do so. I never say never, but we have no plans."

The PS3's SPUs, known as the Cell processor, was bespoke technology which is quite alien compared to the PS4's more-standard CPU proccessors – this means it would be a mammoth task to bring PS3 games to PS4 natively.

During its E3 press conference earlier this week, Microsoft announced limited Xbox One backward compatibility for 100 Xbox 360 games by the end of the year. 

"It was surprising," Yoshida said of that reveal. "I didn't think it was possible. There must be lots of engineering effort. They talked about 100 games, but what kind of games will be included? Is it smaller games or big games? We don't know."

Mass Effect is one backward compatible game, while Red Dead Redemption currently leads a poll of Xbox fan for the game they'd most like to see made available to play on Xbox One. 

Sony does offer select PS3 games on PS4 and other devices via its PlayStation Now streaming service.