Rumor: PS4 to provide streaming access to PS3 games

PanARMENIAN.Net - The rumors about Sony's next PlayStation console keep coming, with a new story claiming that the console will be able to play older games made for the PlayStation 3.

According to a Neowin report, The Wall Street Journal, via unnamed sources, said that the backwards compatibility with PS3 games won't be a direct hardware feature of the next PlayStation console but rather be implemented as a streaming games feature from a cloud-based service.

It's been highly rumored that the next PlayStation will have some kind of streaming game capability. In July 2012, Sony bought Gaikai, which developed its own solution for cloud-based games, for $380 million. However, it remains to be seen just how many gamers are even interested in streaming games to their console like they do with videos and music.

There's no information yet on what Sony might charge for such a service, if anything. If this rumor is true, it might also mean that all of those PS3 discs in the collections of gamers might still be useless with the new console, unless Sony has figured out a way for the hardware to recognize a PS3 disc and then stream that same game to the new machine, Neowin says.