PS2 games on PS4: Sony won't improve selection

Back on June 15, 2015 - during its E3 presser - Microsoft announced that Xbox One was becoming backward compatible with Xbox 360 games. In an interview with Time, Sony global sales chief Jim Ryan mentioned that, while Sony has worked on getting older games to run on the PS4, nobody wants to play those games anymore.

The PlayStation 4 does not offer backwards compatibility support in quite the same way that the Xbox One does, and comments from PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan suggested that backwards compatibility is a much-requested, but hardly ever used feature of consoles.

The studio analyzed data from close to one million active Xbox One users for five months, starting on September 2016.

"Microsoft appears to have stopped surfacing this kind of extremely granular Xbox Live usage data sometime in mid-February, which is probably a good thing from a user-privacy perspective", writes Ars Technica's Kyle Orland. "For context, that means the hundreds of backward compatible Xbox 360 games combine to represent less than half of the play time that a game like Grand Theft Auto V manages on its own", explained Ars Technica.

Backward compatible games may not be the Xbox One's killer app, but it's also worth noting that Microsoft didn't completely abandon its vision for an all-in-one entertainment system. It was an announcement that proved to be one of the biggest of the entire show. 2010's Call of Duty: Black Ops saw heavy playtime among Ars Technica's sample data, but no other Xbox 360 titles had similar playtime rates.

PS2 games on PS4: Sony won't improve selection

Overall, though, it looks like Ryan's sentiment carries over to the Xbox ecosystem.

One could argue that the list of classic PS2 and PS3 games that could be played on the PS4 is much larger than the list of Xbox 360 games now available to play. However, the rest of backwards compatibility titles fall far from this result, and no other game having presence in the top 100 most popular titles in the console.

Of course, this debate becomes even more heated when you consider that Sony does offer users the ability to play older titles through their PlayStation Now service and a steady stream of HD re-releases.

Sony has also previously stated that part of the reason why they are so hesitant to offer backward compatibility is that it's actually incredibly hard to design or redesign a console to allow for that feature.