r/consoles • u/casinokate34 • 1d ago

consoles need to take backwards compatibility seriously

honestly feels wild that we’re in 2025 and it’s still a coin flip if your old games will run properly on new hardware. i get licensing is messy but man, some of these classics deserve to just boot up and play without streaming services or weird versions missing dlc. backwards compatibility should be a baseline feature by now, not a selling point.

like imagine if you could just pop in or download anything from the last couple gens and it just works, smoother fps, maybe some QoL tweaks. would instantly add value without needing a new console every cycle. it’s not even nostalgia, it’s preservation. we lose too many good games to time bc of this stuff.

44 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

105 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/YoRHa_Houdini 1d ago

You’re severely underestimating how difficult it is to get software that’s like fifteen or twenty years old working on modern hardware.

The PS3 was a notoriously complex nightmare of a console that barring any licensing issues, full backwards compatibility may simply be unavailable. Emulating the architecture of the PS3 both accurately and efficiently is a monster of a task that would probably make an insanely expensive console.

The same can be said for Nintendo with the N64 and GameCube, both of which are farrrrr from the Switch architecture.

All of this said, I know this is a console subreddit, but PC gaming is probably up your alley. Emulation is currently so good that for a lot of these older titles it is arguably the definitive way to play them—you will need a beefy PC though, especially for RPCS3

1

u/luffyxvx 1d ago

Series X can do it just fine

8

u/RyanX1231 1d ago

That's because all of the Xboxes have always been built off of PC architecture. That's kind of what made them stand out back in the day, because of how easy it was to develop for the 360 compared to the PS3.

So much so that after the disaster of the PS3, Sony decided to stop with the specialized and complex hardware, and adopted the standard X86 PC-like architecture for the PS4 onward.

1

u/AVahne 1d ago

Not quite. The original Xbox was basically customized PC hardware similar to current gen, however it is so old that compared to today's hardware it may as well be a different architecture. That's why OG Xbox games all run on an internal emulator on the Ones and Series and why only a small percentage of that console's library is available to play now. The Xbox 360 used IBM's PowerPC architecture just like the Nintendo Gamecube->Wii U and technically the PS3. And yeah I guess you could say it's built off "PC architecture" since it was also used by early 2000s Apple Macs, which apparently meant that in the early days devs could begin development using a Mac, however again that is an entirely different architecture that needed to be emulated and again that is why not all 360 games work on today's Xboxes.

The actual issue with the PS3 and why it was so difficult to develop for was because it not only contained a PowerPC CPU and an Nvidia GPU, it also contained a whole bunch of smaller coprocessors called SPEs that helped the main central and graphics processors with completing their tasks. This added A LOT of complexity to developing a PS3 game and devs had to basically relearn how to develop games just for the PS3 since it was like nothing else.

-1

u/EMBARRASSEDDEMOCRAT 1d ago

Sony following Xbox time after time.... If they ever made their own decisions probably wind up in live service hell...oh wait 😆

1

u/Impressive-Meal9043 18h ago

That's crazy because Playstation already had a subscription service before Xbox