Excellent news for PlayStation 4 owners! Are you still saving up to buy the new PlayStation 5 but you’re not in the position to upgrade just quite yet? You are in luck because Sony has revealed that the PS5 will have an “incredibly powerful” backward compatibility feature that will allow PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 players to play multiplayer games together online.
Just quite recently, Sony held its Corporate Strategy Meeting in Tokyo for the fiscal year 2019. This was perhaps PlayStation’s biggest meeting for 2019 since we got a plethora of PS5 information.
In the meeting, PlayStation executives focused on a number of things such as PS5’s faster loading times, along with discussing its “improved computational power and a customized ultra-fast, broadband SSD.”
During the meeting, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Jim Ryan talked more about PS5’s backward compatibility and its ability to play multiplayer games with the current-gen PS4.
“Backwards compatibility, in a networked era, becomes something that is incredibly powerful,” Jim Ryan explained. “Because the gaming community is somewhat tribal in its nature, backwards compatibility gives us the opportunity to migrate that community from PlayStation 4 to next gen using the ability to play the PS4 games they have on their next generation console – groups of 10, 20, 50 gamers. So we see this, given the size of the community that we’ve been able to accumulate over all these years and hard work on PlayStation 4 as a really critical success factor for us. We think it’s incredibly important.”
Of course, this is because Sony reckons that the current-gen PS4 will “remain the engine of engagement and profitability in the next three years.”
Sony’s Deputy President, John Kodera, said that this cross-generation compatibility will allow Sony to engage and bridge players from one generation to the next.
“Cross-generation the community can enjoy the games together,” said Kodera.
Whenever a new console appears in the market, players have to make investments, sell their old ones in exchange for new ones, and sometimes even to change their platforms completely.
Considering this, Sony’s tactic to bridge the gap between the current-gen PS4 and the next-gen PS5 by adding backward compatibility for online multiplayer games is excellent! Not only from a consumer’s viewpoint but also a marketing standpoint.
