Anyone else worried about console makers maintaining backwards compatibility?

[Sol_NB]

I like consoles and have been thinking of going back to them from my PC because I am getting bit fatigued with upkeeping the parts and drivers and worried things will run well, but one thing making me nervous about it is the commitment these console makers have to backwards compatibility and there commitment to having legacy software still be playable on newer hardware years down the line. PC games kinda keep working always unless servers shut down. Is this a concern worth having? 

[Needfuldoer]

I'm not concerned, so long as old consoles keep working.

[Monkey Dust]

On 8/18/2023 at 1:34 AM, Needfuldoer said:

I'm not concerned, so long as old consoles keep working.

And you buy your games as much as possible as physical copies.

[Sol_NB]

14 hours ago, Monkey Dust said:

And you buy your games as much as possible as physical copies.

Even then nowadays discs are so tied to downloading day one patches and stuff that even having a disc may not gurantee you can still play the game if the servers shut down 

[Monkey Dust]

2 hours ago, Sol_NB said:

Even then nowadays discs are so tied to downloading day one patches and stuff that even having a disc may not gurantee you can still play the game if the servers shit down 

True. But by the time that happens, hopefully the community will have an answer for that.

 

Game perseveration is sadly getting harder, rather than easier

[Error 52]

At the end of the day, none of us can predict the future, but I expect backwards compatibilty to be more and more standard as time passes. Consoles more and more are running off of standardized architecture that's built with cross-compatibility in mind - compare that to the PS3 or even the GBA, where they pretty much had to jam the PS2/GBC into it in order to achieve backwards compatibilty - and it helps lock players into their ecosystem. If someone was a PS4 player but wanted to hop over to the Xbox Series instead of the PS5, well, the fact that they'd lose all their PS4 games makes that decision a lot harder. Add the fact that long term GaaS is becoming the preferred model over just buying new games and I think backwards compatibility is more or less here to stay.

 

 

[BrandonLatzig]

its a scale
While it is good to maintain backwards compatibility, they need a reason to do it. There has to be an interest in a game for it to either be remade or ported forward, otherwise it ends up on a rom site, never to be downloaded unless people are making giant libraries to say "I have every game on X system"
I do personally believe that every game should be backed up and cataloged in a mueseum, just because it is history, its something to learn from ,if not the game itself, from its development, what it changed in the industry, etc.