If there’s one area of the so-called ‘console wars’ that Sony and PlayStation have consistently been losing in for the past few years, it’s backwards compatibility.
While both behemoths have been fairly equal recently in terms of flexing their financial muscles, with Microsoft having bought Activision Blizzard and Sony having added Bungie to its stable of studios, the former has been doing a much better job of utilising its back catalogue.
However, Sony could finally be ready to fight back on this front, as the publisher has created a new internal team focused on game preservation.
Sony Creates PlayStation Preservation Team
This news comes via a Linkedin post by Garrett Fredley, who announced he’s been hired as one of the initial members of the new team, with the official job title of Senior Build Engineer.
“Game Preservation was my first career passion. It was my first foray into the world of Software Engineering / Dev Ops, and into a world that so many are unaware of.” said Fredley in the post, adding: “I was just a novice back then, contributing any way I could regardless of my inexperience. Now, I'm back to it, no longer the novice I once was.”
Fredley also thanked Mike Bishop, a Global QA Manager at PlayStation, for the opportunity and finished by saying: “Let's go and ensure our industry's history isn't forgotten!”.
Bishop replied to Fredley’s post echoing a similar sentiment, saying: “Let's preserve ALL OF THE THINGS! Really excited to be working with you”.
While there don’t seem to be any concrete indications of which forms of preservation Bishop and Fredley’s team will be tasked with delivering, Playstation fans reacting to the news on Reddit presented a few ideas they’d like to see implemented.
“Let PS3 emulation be real, and bring over more classics to PS through the new PS Plus memberships” said user ilikemonsterhunter, with another user adding that they’d like to be able to install old games from their PS3 disks, similarly to Xbox’s backwards compatibility.
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