Sony: PSVR2 Is 'Truly Next-Generation,' So It Can't Play PSVR1 Games (arstechnica.com) 53
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Sony executive confirmed Friday that the PlayStation VR 2 will not be backward-compatible with games developed for the original PlayStation VR. Sid Shuman, senior director of content communications at Sony Interactive, asked Hideaki Nishino, senior vice president of platform experience at Sony, whether games for the original PSVR could be played on a PSVR2 kit on the Official PlayStation Podcast, episode 439 (his answer starts at 29:12). "PSVR games are not compatible with PSVR2 because PSVR2 is designed to deliver a truly next-generation VR experience," Nishino said. Nishino listed several "much more advanced features" in the VR2, including new controllers with haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, advanced eye tracking, and 3D audio. "That means developing games for PSVR2 requires a whole different approach than the original PSVR."
While the answer was emphatic -- not compatible -- and closed off any hope fans might have harbored, Nishino's checklist of new VR2 features didn't clearly explain why the system would be incapable of running less-advanced VR1 games. Consider the Oculus Rift S, which touted an entirely different eye tracking system than its predecessor, the original Oculus Rift. The Rift S maintained compatibility with games built for any Rift system (along with some games for other headsets). It was a seamless transition for those who upgraded their Rift or bought into VR at a later stage. It's also a disappointing outcome for some great games that were available only on PlayStation VR. Those include the original Mario-caliber Astro Bot, brain-twisting puzzle-game Statik, the VR mode for Resident Evil 7 that never saw release on any other system, first-party VR exclusive Blood & Truth, and a VR mode for WipEout that could only benefit from a VR2 headset.
While the answer was emphatic -- not compatible -- and closed off any hope fans might have harbored, Nishino's checklist of new VR2 features didn't clearly explain why the system would be incapable of running less-advanced VR1 games. Consider the Oculus Rift S, which touted an entirely different eye tracking system than its predecessor, the original Oculus Rift. The Rift S maintained compatibility with games built for any Rift system (along with some games for other headsets). It was a seamless transition for those who upgraded their Rift or bought into VR at a later stage. It's also a disappointing outcome for some great games that were available only on PlayStation VR. Those include the original Mario-caliber Astro Bot, brain-twisting puzzle-game Statik, the VR mode for Resident Evil 7 that never saw release on any other system, first-party VR exclusive Blood & Truth, and a VR mode for WipEout that could only benefit from a VR2 headset.
No one appreciates (Score:3)
The effort of making systems reverse compatible. ($$$) They'd tell enthusiasts just to buy both systems.
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Oh my god.
No, just keep that old piece of junk around if you want to play those games, which people rarely do.
Rarely do.
Rarely do.
Rarely do. "My investment in them!" What part of keep that old piece of junk around is confusing?
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the insane effort done worldwide for decades on both hardware and software reverse engineering, replication and emulation so as to be able to both play older games on newer hardware, older games on original hardware and even newer games on older hardware in some cases, demonstrates that yes, people do want to play games on what _you consider_ "old piece of junk"
so I don't know what to answer directly to you besides shut the fuck up?
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Buying both systems is an option while you still can. But chances are once the PSVR2 comes out, the PSVR will be clearanced to make room and Sony will no longer make the PSVR. Which basically kills an entire library of games.
Especially since that library of games is pretty impressive and already works on the hardware PSVR2 is targeting - Sony made sure PSVR worked on both the PS4 and PS5, and even offered owners of PSVR a free adapter to ensure the camera of PSVR worked on PS5.
The key bit here is not that P
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I was going to complain about the fact that any halfway-decent VR controller should be able to easily emulate the handful of buttons on the woefully inadequate Move controller to provide backwards compatibility with existing games... but then you provided an excellent counter-argument as to why what would be a bad idea.
>It also calls into question - as a developer of VR games, do you want to target the PSVR which has an existing install base and works on PS4 and PS5, or you want to target the better PSVR
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If putting in the time and effort to make the system backwards compatible will not yield sufficient sales to justify that time and effort, it simply does not make business sense to do it.
Some features are in a class where everyone will claim to want the feature when the issue comes up, but user-analysis reveals that almost nobody uses the feature, or they use it very little. Like maybe they play games from their existing library for a bit once they get the new hardware, but after they buy just a few new ga
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And in fact it may actually have a negative return on investment. Consider:
How many customers who otherwise would have bought the new version will decide against it because it lacks backwards compatibility? That, times their per-unit profit, is the cost of not including backwards compatibility.
However - it's generally accepted that Sony actually sells their consoles, and likely their VR gear, at a loss, with the expectation that license fees from game sales will make up the difference. Which means that s
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History of backward compatibility at Sony (Score:2)
If putting in the time and effort to make the system backwards compatible will not yield sufficient sales to justify that time and effort, it simply does not make business sense to do it. {...} Like maybe they play games from their existing library for a bit once they get the new hardware, but after they buy just a few new games, that's it, they never play their old games again.
I find it even worse when you compare this PSVR1/2 compatibility trouble against the history of backward compatibility of Sony devices.
It seems most Sony device have tried hard to be backward compatible.
- PS2 could play PS1 games thanks to a subset of it chipset being present in the former.
- PS3 could play PS1 (emulation) and PS2 (combination of hardware chipset and/or emulation; though by the time of the slim the emulator was discontinued).
- PS4 is the only major breakage, with backward compatibility not b
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The effort of making systems reverse compatible. ($$$) They'd tell enthusiasts just to buy both systems.
There is no effort in making systems reverse compatible other than forethought in designing a solid scalable and extensible API. Sony are either lying or they massively fucked up. It's not difficult. There's a reason Steam VR is API compatible with the OculusAPI, why the latest touch sensitive controllers work fine with games that don't support touch, or even with completely different controllers, why you can use an Index controller to simulate an Oculus CV1 controller or a Quest 2 controller.
It takes a spe
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>There is no effort in making systems reverse compatible other than forethought in designing a solid scalable and extensible API.
So your solution is to go back in time to when they were designing the PSVR system and design a solid scalable and extensible API instead of what they came up with. Got it.
How does that help them with the actual costs NOW to support those games on the PSVR2?
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To me the latest gen Sony consoles, for example, are handicapped by the library of PS5 games, but fortunately PS4 compatibility comes to the rescue.
Similarly, Creative Labs wouldn't have been as successful with Soundblaster had it not been able to implement OPL2/OPL3 used by Adlib which already had an extensiv
Buy Our New Shit. (Score:5, Interesting)
"We don't want to spend time to write an emulator, though it's perfectly possible to do so with the advanced features of this new system."
"We want you to buy our new, more expensive stuff, because we want you to buy our new, more expensive stuff."
Reading their original statement reeks of corporate double speak. I'd love to hear an actual developer make a comment about this.
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Unfortunately those developers are "work for hire" and the company owns the copyright for every line of code they write.
They also very likely have signed an NDA and legally aren't allowed to comment.
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Keep that old piece of junk around if you want to imagine you'll continue playing those games.
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It's the second. This isn't about emulating. The PS5 is compatible with PS4 games. This is about someone either being grossly incompetent when designing an Input API for controllers and head position which isn't forwards/backwards compatible (unlike basically every other VR system on the market), or Sony is trying to sell you the same shit twice, and since this is Sony...
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Well damn that's inconvenient
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PSVR2 uses inside out tracking where PSVR used a camera to track lights. In this instance it's not because they failed to emulate the old API, it's that they can't recreate a 2D HD RGB image to emulate what a PSVR camera would have seen to translate your head/controller movements into whatever the game wanted.
While they certainly gave you an SDK with plenty of code that does the tracking, they didn't prevent you from access the image directly and so any emulation they tried to do would fail at something. Es
"It's new! Improved!" (Score:2)
Means, "doesn't work with your old stuff".
This is a problem throughout the industry. And in cases where they do bend over backwards to stay bug-for-bug compatible (*cough* you-know-who *cough* up until a while ago) that eventually becomes untenable.
Both problems are arguments for better design. This probably isn't something that capitalism can fix. But it does need fixing, for a variety of reasons.
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If it's hard to provide backwards compatibility today, it's because they made decisions that make that hard. The new processor will run the same code, and the new GPU (and driver) will support the same APIs. It's not like games are cycle-perfect any more, they run on top of an operating system that's doing shit in the background. If the new hardware is so much better than the old hardware, and if it is based on the same or a compatible architecture which it probably is, then lack of backwards compatibility
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Sony does things differently to Xbox/PC. They made hardware that was capable of running PS4 code natively, Microsoft went with indirection where games ran in a VM and API code would get translated through a driver to the current GPU. It's a lot more complicated on both systems in practice but that's the gist and both approaches have pros and cons.
They *could* start running PS4 code in a VM and providing an emulation layer to allow upscaling and increased performance, but they clearly want "correct" output w
Capitalism can fix it effortlessly but (Score:2)
too few care and without Free and Open hardware demand by the consumer it will remain a niche interest.
Either he was told to lie, or volunteered (Score:2)
Either he was told to lie, or volunteered to do so. Either way, if something is truly next-generation, it can do what the prior generation does, and then some.
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Ummm, no.
Keep that old piece of junk around if you want to imagine you'll continue playing those games.
"It's a next generation car!"
"Oh, yeah? Where's its gas engine?"
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I don't know how to get through to you that what you said makes absolutely no sense, so I'll just leave this head-shaking comment here anyway.
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It's a next generation car! That's why it can't drive on the same roads. That would be more like it. There's nothing about PSVR1 software that inherently precludes an evolved setup to work with it.
PSVR and PSVR2 are both ultimately the same OS and same processor architecture, so this means they aren't bothering to implement an extensible framework for their VR ecosystem where their design would simply extend and be able to support the 'old' stuff.
Puts the con in console (Score:2)
Backward compatibility has always been about being able to claim large numbers of games from the start, always a problem for new consoles until they get established.
It's not about some imagined game console audiophile equivalent's cool feature so you can throw out your old console.
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It's not about some imagined game console audiophile equivalent's cool feature so you can throw out your old console.
It is about getting rid of your old console, though. I have been a gamer all my life, and when I was younger and it was more important to me I used to have lots of them connected at once... at one point, I had eleven consoles all hooked up where I only needed to frob some switchboxes to use any specific one of them. But reality is that even getting up over just a couple of consoles means a bunch of wiring and bullshit to manage, and the fewer the better. It's better when you don't need as many different kin
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It's also about being able to revisit a favorite old game after the old equipment has stopped working, repairs are infeasible, and acquiring replacement is more a 'collectors' price territory instead of 'I just want to play my old game"
no man's sky is all that matters. (Score:2)
Console Failure (Score:2)
They padded out the libraries of the Playstation 2 and the Playstation 3 with the previous generation titles.
How are they actually making this mis-step? How are they not realizing it's important to keep playing the previous VR titles?
Adding new advanced features doesn't mean you have to require them. You should still be able to run stuff that doesn't require them.
SONY once again ... (Score:3)
Shoots itself in the foot.
In the name of greed, most probably.
Like ...
When they made a portable console that requires spinning disks for games (we want people to buy all their movies AGAIN)
Like ...
When they made a switch console before the switch itself (VITA), but castrated it by removing the TV output. (even though its predecessor, the PSP had it!) in order to sell you a second VITA, the VITA TV, that had no screen but could connect to a TV.
I don't know where the greed exactly lies this time, but I wouldn't be surprised it still is the reason to backstab the customers.
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More abject BS from Sony.
Sony: the company that tried to add a rootkit to your PC when you played a CD; removed the other OS (linux) option from PS (and screwed the US Air Force?), etc.
And in this case per PC Mag:
Why Won't PlayStation VR 2 Play PS VR Games? Sony Doesn't Have a Good Reason
Sony SVP of Platform Experience Hideaki Nishino confirms that you won't be able to play your PS VR games on the PS VR 2. But his explanation for why makes no sense.
By Will Greenwald
September 17, 2022
[SNIP]
To be clear, these
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Lucky I sold Battlezone back to CEX or maybe GAME (Score:1)
Expect a number of free PS5/PSVR2 game updates (Score:2)
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This is kind of what I'm expecting, too. The library is simply too large for PSVR for it to be ignored. And it has an abnormally great amount of very good games. When I saw the announcement that PSVR2 would use inside-out tracking, I kind of expected that there would be very little, if any, backward compatibility with the original PSVR. It's a fundamentally different approach to motion tracking. But, as you state, I also expect a bunch of free updates to some of the most popular titles.
It is like Kinect Kinect 2 (Score:2)
Basically the hardware works differently and would require games to be reworked. Fair warning.
At this poiny you wouldn't have any of the old games if you didn't already have the hardware anyway.
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Table top board games (Score:2)
Imagine you buying the newest version of your favorite table top board game but you're required to buy a new table because the old table you had for the old board game doesn't fit the new game but the new table you bought for the new game can't accommodate the old board game.
I'd be interested to see in what universe some dude bought two different tables to play two different version of monopoly because the tables were not compatible... hahaha!!!
Eye tracking (Score:3)
Backward compatibility is hard (Score:2)
Granted, they could probably support some watered down, crappy version of backward compatibility, but the number of complaints about quality would likely to bad, that it's not worth the effort.
A clean slate is much better in this case IMHO.
Argue All You Want (Score:1)
It really doesn't matter as to whether Sony can or can't make it backwards compatible. They won't because Sony is a lazy, selfish company that thinks they know what people want, when in reality they're a bunch of morons.
"People don't understand how difficult backward compatibility can be!"
It's really not. The people out there who have built emulators worked hard, but that's because they had to reverse engineer how the hardware worked into software for completely different hardware WITHOUT any of the proprie
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Minidisc was pretty good in its day, when it was cheaper than flash. But Sony tried really hard to make it suck, and ultimately succeeded. They had a PC drive with a PC Card but it didn't let you write audio files, and all the later Minidisc players forced you to use their crappy software, so the best case was buying one of the early units that had spdif over toslink and copying your CDs to minidisc at 1:1 speed, ugh.
Then flash came out and all such things became stupid, which is why you're 100% correct on
Is Playstation still a thing? (Score:2)
I mean, it plays unreasonably expensive games and that's it. No remote desktop, all the other apps are already on the tv itself. It's a game playing money pit.
I decided to wait for steam deck
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I'm with you, I lost interest in consoles when they managed to get them locked down hard enough that it wasn't worth running Linux on them. It's just too much hardware which costs too much to have it be worthless when I'm done playing those games, and they take up too much space to keep around for just one or two games when I can play tons of them on my PC. If a game is old enough that it won't run on a modern OS, it's probably also old enough to run in some kind of VM, so the backwards compatibility is phe
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