Sony is building a team to ‘preserve’ old games

According to Engadget, when Sony’s expanded PlayStation Plus service starts rolling out next month, it will be available in PlayStation Now and provide access to hundreds of games from older generations of consoles. Now, it seems the company is getting more serious about preserving games from the past.

Sony wants to ‘preserve’ old games more seriously reuters

According to Twitter and LinkedIn posts spotted by VCG, Sony has hired at least one engineer (informed to be Garrett Fredley, a former civil engineer for mobile developer Kabam) to work on a team. ‘preserve’ the newly established game. It is not clear what this group will do or what Sony’s future goals will be.

In an interview in 2017, Sony CEO Jim Ryan talked about how he saw the titles Gran Turismo on PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4, and ask yourself why people still like to play old games with many aspects that cannot be compared with modern games. He emphasized that he did not intend to belittle the history of games, and his attention has laid the foundation for many old games to reappear on Sony’s new subscription service.

Sony doesn’t always do a good job of maintaining older games. Many PS1 games work on PS2, and early PS3 models can run many PS1 and PS2 games, but you can’t run game discs from older generations on PS4. The PSP digital store also closed last summer, though Sony backed off its plan to close the PS3 and Vita stores following backlash from the community. There’s no guarantee that every PS3 and PSP-exclusive game will be available on the new PlayStation Plus, which also won’t feature Vita titles.

However, the new PS5 does support all older games except for a few PS4 titles, showing a bright future for older games on modern platforms. And this is a good sign to see that Sony is focusing more on preserving old games.

In addition to Sony, Microsoft also understands that people still want to play old games on modern platforms and has put more emphasis on backwards compatibility in recent years. Xbox Series X/S can run games as old as the original Xbox.

About Nintendo, like Sony, the company doesn’t really excel at preserving old games. The 3DS and Wii U stores will be closed next year, and likely won’t be porting all games from those devices to the Nintendo Switch. Many of those games will not be accessible to future generations of players.