[lambda_lord]

Your second point is why the stores need to be opened up.

Nintendo breaks compatibility almost every generation, so if you want to replay old games you already purchased on a previous console, you have to repurchase the ported versions or buy Nintendo’s subscription service. I’ve dropped hundreds in the eShop but worry I’ll lose access one day, when the Switch is EOL.

In comparison, I’ve been able to run my Steam games on multiple devices through the years because PC is a much more open platform. There are multiple shops, so Steam has incentive to keep games forward compatible.

[ksec]

>so if you want to replay old games you already purchased on a previous console,

I assume you can turn on your old console and replay those games right?

Why does the next generation console has to guarantee to work with older games?

[filoleg]

That seems like a very uniquely Nintendo problem rather than a modern console problem.

Yeah, PS3 was from the era of consoles where backwards compatibility wasn’t as heavily demanded (given that Steam was in its infancy too), so they went with a notoriously and uniquely overcomplicated making games for it (and, by extension, compatibility). But PS4 era and onwards, any digital purchase you made back then for PS4 is accessible on PS5 as well.

And hell, even for PS3 digital purchases it is still kind of true. Unfortunately, PS4/5 cannot play PS3 games natively, but if you purchased a digital PS3 game back then, you are able to stream it using PS Remote Play on your PS4/5.

As far as I am aware, a similar thing happened in the Xbox space as well. Xbox One generation and onwards, any digital purchases you made back then are available on the most recent Xbox consoles. And for older games that aren’t natively compatible (and even a bunch of those that are compatible), they provide streaming too (through xCloud). Though don’t quote me on the exact details about how it works for Xbox consoles, as I haven’t used one since the Xbox360 days.

Meanwhile, Nintendo resells SNES era games in their “virtual console” section of Switch eShop at a pretty significant premium.

[fomine3]

> PS3 was from the era of consoles where backwards compatibility wasn’t as heavily demanded

I don't think so for PlayStaion. PS3 and PS2 had compatibility to older PS by implement old chip. I think why there's no PS3 compatibility is because PS3 unique Cell architecture was dead end.

[filoleg]

Yes and no. PS2 was compatible with PS1, but only the first batch of PS3 consoles was compatible with PS2 (as you said, they quite literally just built-in a PS2 chip inside a PS3). After that first initial batch, Sony stopped including the PS2 chip inside a PS3, so PS2 backwards compatibility was pretty much dead. And yeah, the lack of backwards compatibility was almost certainly due to the Cell chip architecture.

So yeah, as you pointed out, for Sony it seems like their compatibility goes a bit further into the pre-PS3 era, but for other console makers it wasn't quite the case. Couldn't play original Xbox games on Xbox360 (there is a list of like a dozen games that are backwards compatible, and even then there are issues with some of them like framerate), and neither could you do that with Nintendo/Sega consoles. In that sense, Sony was a bit of an outlier in that they came early to the backwards compatibility game. But these days, 2 out of 3 major console manufacturers pretty much standardized backwards compatibility as a simple "plug and play" feature.

[filoleg]

Past the edit cutoff, so here is an important edit.

In the 2nd paragraph, i missed a word and meant to say “[…] they went with a Cell chip, making gamedev experience for it notoriously and uniquely overcomplicated.”