Microsoft made waves at E3 2015 when the company announced Xbox 360 games would be coming to the Xbox One via a Backward Compatibility program. Sony, on the other hand, hasn’t done much with backwards compatibility outside of PS Now. This may seem like a missed opportunity, but there’s actually little reason to support it. In an interview with Time, Sony global sales chief Jim Ryan mentioned that, while Sony has worked on getting older games to run on the PS4, nobody wants to play those games anymore.
"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," he said. "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?"
This may sound like a silly thing to say, but it’s true (at least on Xbox Live). In a report by Ars Technica, the outlet surveyed how 930,000 Xbox Live users spent their time over a period of a few months. While it’s unsurprising that almost 55 percent of Xbox One users spend time playing Xbox One games, it’s more shocking to see only 1.5 percent of users spending time playing Xbox 360 games.
To compare, the percent of users who spend time on YouTube is over four times the percent for Xbox 360 games. Netflix alone is 11 times more popular than playing backward compatible games. Granted, this doesn’t include the recent surge of renewed interest in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, but the numbers are dramatically lower than anticipated.
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One could argue that the list of classic PS2 and PS3 games that could be played on the PS4 is much larger than the list of Xbox 360 games currently available to play. It’s also possible the games could be more attractive for people to play, instead of the list of ho-hum games like Astropop and RoboBlitz on Xbox One. That being said, the Xbox usage statistics certainly aren’t appealing enough for Sony to bother with anything. So what does Sony plan to focus time on instead? Esports.
"It's a subject that is occupying us quite a lot these days, and something we're looking at very carefully," Ryan told Time . "We're trying to find precisely what the role of the platform holder is in that value chain. Seeing how we can actually make the whole eSports thing bigger, better, different and bespoke to PlayStation is something you're going to be hearing quite a lot about in the next year or two."
So what do you think? Are you bummed to know Sony has no plans on backward compatibility coming to consoles? Are you surprised to see so few gamers taking advantage of the backward compatibility program on Xbox One? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
