Backwards compatibility is a ways off
Backwards compatibility may not matter very much to most consumers, but to people like me who have extensive libraries and only so much physical space in our media centers, support for older software is of great importance. With PlayStation 4, Sony will be using the cloud service Gaikai sometime in 2014 to provide backwards compatibility. According to Eurogamer, sources expect Sony to kick off the service in Q3 2014 in North America and 2015 in Europe.
“We’re on track to have a commercial service up and running in the US first within 2014,” SCEI president Andrew House told the outlet. “But what’s important is to understand the full scope of what we’re trying to achieve and why we felt the Gaikai acquisition was important. Our goal is to be able to have a new form of game distribution streamed from the server side, initially to PS4 consoles then gradually moving that out to Vita. But eventually, the endgame is to have this available on a multitude of network-connected devices, essentially delivering a console-quality gaming experience on devices which are not innately capable of doing that.”
House wouldn’t divulge anything specific about Gaikai’s European launch, but noted “It’s a brand new form of delivery. We need to prove out the technology, which we feel is good at its core, but we place — as I think is quite right — a real emphasis on delivering a quality experience for consumers. And that will be dependent to a degree on what the strength of broadband connection is going to be, and what our server deployment and infrastructure looks like. We’re hard at work on all of those fronts, but I’m not at a point right now where I can be specific about when our European fans are going to be able to enjoy that.”
PS4 looks set to break records at launch [Eurogamer]
