Those of you who’ve logged countless hours into gaming on the Playstation 3 undoubtedly thought, or at least hoped, that all of your investments would still be viable with the Playstation 4. If it wasn’t unfortunate enough that the console won’t be backwards compatible, it also won’t natively acknowledge your Playstation Network purchases including PSN games and their saves.
It’s certainly disheartening to hear that something that appears simple, at least for “arcade” games, in concept won’t be carrying over.
Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida, explained the situation to Joystiq:
…We aren’t talking about our emulation plans as yet. There are two ways: emulation or cloud service. But native support, no, sorry. We could do so if we choose to. We know who purchased what as a record. But we are working on service plans, and we haven’t decided.
The company has already expressed hopes of being able to stream title from every console it has released through the new Gaikai streaming service. Perhaps one day this will also include digital releases from the PSN.
The most interesting part about this is to see what Microsoft plans to do with this issue with their Durango and how big of an impact that decision will have on their console.