The PS3 originally played PS2 games remember? And no one cares so Sony scrapped the feature.
People cared. It's not why they dropped the feature: it was merely prohibitively expensive.
PS2 was the most successful console of all time. Sony was living on a high, very confident in their position of power. And they came up with a strategy to straight up demolish the competition and become the reigning game champs forever:
The PS3's architecture made it incredibly powerful and very different to program for than any other system. That way it would disincentivize people from making games for multiple platforms: game development is expensive, and making a game for the PS3 AND 360 was more work than making a game for PS2 and Xbox. This way developers would only make games for the PS3 and Microsoft and whatever crazy shit Nintendo did would die out without by third party support.
That's obviously not what happened, the PS3 was super expensive, which lead to low initial sales, which lead to third party support dropping from PS3 since it was cheaper to make games just for the 360 than just for the PS3...
That architecture is also what makes it impossible for backwards capability. The PS4 flat out can't run PS3 games because it's architecture is, for lack of a better term, "normal".
When the PS3 came out, the backwards compatible version essentially had an entire second system built inside of it. Basically it had a PS2 built inside its case to run PS2 and PSX games. Hence the ridiculous cost.
I cared enough that I snapped up a ps1/2/3 80gb at the time, and managed to track down a refurbished 60gb a couple years ago. I haven't bought a ps4 yet precisely because of the lack of backwards compatibility. Obviously I've got no effect on the success of the ps4 but there are some of us out there that value it highly. ---
nu-horsemen 4evar [A GameFAQs Moderator was deleted by this message]