While you’re all weighing your options when it comes to picking up a shiny new PS4 this holiday season, be aware that your previous PSN purchases and save games may not carry over. Pitchforks and torches at the ready, folks.
Now while this may be due to the radically different hardware architecture of both machines, Shuhei Yoshida, head of Sony Worldwide Studios, did try to calm the nerd rage by saying they will be trying to make the digital purchases playable in some form. Yoshida has told Polygon that it could be possible for PS4’s future cloud services to recognize users’ PS3 PS Store purchases, if Sony should “choose” to make it so.
“We could do so if we choose to,” he said. “We know who purchased what as a record. But we are working on service plans and we haven’t decided.”
The PlayStation firm has already suggested that some older games could be streamed to PS4 using the Gaikai service; but they didn’t say how many “some” is or how old the “older games” could be. Possibly a special list like Microsoft did for the Xbox 360, making some games backwards compatible but not the entire library. The speculation abounds!
Whether any of this is technologically feasible is the main question here, though. Sure, the PSN is cross-platform from the PS3, to the Vita, to the PSP right now; but maybe the new tech of the PS4 just isn’t capable of such a thing right out the gate.
I suppose we’ll find out next winter, as the PS4 release date is set for “holiday 2013”, likely across Japan, Europe and the US.
