Jim Ryan, the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, found himself in some hot water with the gaming masses after a quote that seemed to dismiss older games. However, in a recently published interview with Axios, Ryan says he didn’t mean to “be disrespectful to our heritage” and simply put his foot in his mouth.
The infamous quote in question was from a 2017 interview with Time Magazine. Ryan was speaking about being at a Gran Turismo event where entries in the franchise from all generations of consoles were being shown. “And the PS1 and the PS2 games,” Ryan said, “they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?”
Just before saying that, Ryan commented on backwards compatibility, a contentious topic now considering PlayStation’s lackluster approach compared to Microsoft’s all-encompassing take on the feature. “When we’ve dabbled with backwards compatibility, I can say it is one of those features that is much requested, but not actually used much,” said Ryan.
Speaking to Axios, Ryan has said that he is “a little bit frustrated at still being hit over the head with this one,” in regards to the Gran Turismo quote. “The point I was trying to make–obviously not very well–was just how great the PS4 version looked and how far the series had evolved,” Ryan continued.
Regardless of whether or not Ryan meant to be dismissive of games from older PlayStation consoles, that certainly seems to be the intent of Sony. While the Xbox Series X and S can run games dating all the way back to the original Xbox, the PlayStation 5 can only run PlayStation 4 games via backwards compatibility.
However, that’s not exactly a problem for most players since simply getting your hands on a PS5 is still a struggle. Ryan also recently commented on the ongoing hardware shortage, saying that PS5 production would see a sizable increase over the summer.
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