Last week, Sony quietly released PS2 emulation on the PlayStation 4 via four classic games that came along with the Star Wars Battlefront PS4 bundle. Sony later officially confirmed that they are indeed working on the feature. The emulation brings along number of benefits such as better frame rate and resolution, along with improved texture filtering and anit-aliasing solution that will make sure that PS2 games on PS4 look crisper compared to the original version. GamingBolt’s tech team did some analysis on the feature and you can find the results here.
However, does this feature hold value especially given that a number of AAA games are due for the PS4 next year and beyond? Chris Pruett who is the co-founder of Robot Invader certainly thinks so.
“As game design connoisseurs, proper PS2 emulation is a big deal to us,” Chris said in an interview with GamingBolt. “A huge chunk of the golden age of horror games mentioned above ran on the PS2, and many of those games are absolutely worth playing. There are many titles on that platform that could not be made today simply because they are beyond the means of most independent studios but too niche for a large publisher to consider. It’s a catalog of thousands of games.”
It will be interesting to see how Sony updates its catalog of PS2 games for the PS4, and what kind of pricing they will opt for. Personally, I think this strategy is inferior compared to Microsoft’s. Paying for games that you may already own compared to a free feature from your competitor will be a factor in deciding how successful this is going to be for Sony.
On a side note, Robot Invader are working on Dead Secret, a horror game that will be releasing on the PS4 and PS3 next January. It will also be supporting PlayStation VR. If you want to know more about Dead Secret stay tuned for our complete interview with Chris in the coming days. For more on the game, check out this article.