Comment by neighbour

Comment by neighbour 4 days ago

This is all true. Xbox always threatens to leave their current vendors only to end up signing a renewal at the final hours of the contract.

>As a gamedev I have a different perspective: Sony and Nintendo would be fools to give up backwards compatibility just for savings on chips.

In your view, is this issue worse with modern consoles now that the Playstation (and possibly Nintendo) online store purchases persist across generations? Imagine a scenario where someone has a PS4 and PS5, they buy many games through the Playstation Store, then Sony selects a different chip supplier for the PS6. I'm guessing this would cause issues with games that were designed for the older consoles, breaking backwards compatibility.

I'd imagine that if the console manufacturers cared about backwards compatibility, which I think they do, the likelihood of them switching chip providers would decrease with each generation.

wmf 4 days ago

Microsoft maintained backwards compatibility across Intel+Nvidia, IBM+ATI, and AMD+AMD so it's possible. Sony hasn't invested as much in compatibility, instead just keeping the same architecture for PS4/5.

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lxgr 4 days ago

Sony has historically invested a lot into backwards compatibility, going as far as shipping the previous gen's GPU and/or CPU with the PS2, initial PS3 models, and the PS Vita.
PS3 compatibility on the PS4 was notably absent, though.

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- nottorp 3 days ago
  
  Historically. But not presently.
  They could include a software emulator at least for the PS2 (not PS1 because afaik the drive in the PS5 does not read CDs) on the PS5 and let people use old discs, but they don't and instead sell again old games packaged with the emulator in their online store.
  
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  Yeul 3 days ago
  
  I doubt there is a lot of money in PS2 games. Anyone who really wants to play those games can emulate them on PC.
  
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  lxgr 3 days ago
  
  Arguably, there not being a lot of money in them would be a point in favor of Sony shipping an emulator (as a minor perk/nod to long-time ecosystem fans), not against it (which would allow them to keep selling "HD remakes" etc.)
  
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neighbour 4 days ago

True but if you're referring to the fact that you can play Xbox and Xbox 360 games on newer hardware, I believe Microsoft has a team that has to individually patch these games to work for newer hardware.
Sony does something similar I believe with their new Classics Catalogue as part of their most premium PS Plus tier.

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- jamesfinlayson 4 days ago
  
  Yeah I remember the Xbox 360 being hit and miss with backwards compatibility - their FAQs said that most of the time the people working on it had to just look at the raw assembly of games they were trying to get running to figure out what went wrong.
  
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etempleton 4 days ago

Most games were not backwards compatible between Xbox and Xbox 360. They had to do work to make game work and prioritized the most popular games, most notably Halo. With that said, there were certain features that did not work properly. There was a Halo 2 map they took out of the online pool because it used a heavy fog effect that would not render on 360.
From 360 to Xbox One there was a similar situation where they would patch individual games to work, but because it was at least partially emulated, publishers had to sign off on allowing their game to be backwards compatible.

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lxgr 4 days ago

There was no backwards compatibility between the PS3 and PS4 whatsoever (except for PS Plus allowing cloud-based game streaming of some PS3 titles), and Sony survived that as well.

What they did was offer some old PS2 games for purchase, though, which allowed them to tap into that very large back catalog. I could see something like this happen for a hypothetical Intel PS6 as well (i.e. skipping PS5 backwards compatibility and tapping into the large catalog of PS4 and PS4/PS5 games).

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