I'm probably going to regret bring this up - but I've been thinking about Sony's decision to only allow DS4 controllers to work on PS5 when playing Back Compat games. I've heard their pitch - we want a new generation to take advantage of new features. Fair enough.

Something about this feels off. Technology-wise they clearly work. Other accessories will be supported (Fight sticks, PSVR) and that's awesome. When you look at the actual Dualsense features, there is nothing about what they are doing that should prevent DS4 from working.

Same # of buttons. Same layout. Both have haptics, motion, and touch. The one feature only on the Dualsense is the Microphone - and any games *needing* the microphone could use of headset on DS4. There is literally no reason the DS4 would not work for all PS5 games

Haptics is not the reason. The vast majority of games developed for PS5 will be taking DS4 into consideration because 3p will be shipping PS4 versions of games this holiday. And if any of those games have PC versions they have consider last-gen hapics (either for Xbox or PS4) too

What about upgraded titles? If a PS4 game running on PS5 gets an upgrade, does the DS4 stop working? Will customers have to forego title updates for controller compatibility? If they don't, then the argument breaks. If they do this seems very messy.

The crazy thing is - there was a better solution and that would have been to make the DualSense work on the PS4. Stop selling DS4 and make DualSense your "cross-gen" controller.

You'll get a bunch of new controller sales, you'll have a built-in base of customers ready when they want to buy PS4. Or give customers the choice to have degraded haptics and they will upgrade to the DualSense over time.

This seems like a $$ play which is totally Sony's prerogative. What I really hope is that all this leads to a cheaper console. If they really are shooting for $499 or higher, this bill is adding up.

I bet DualSense is more expensive than DS4, too. I'm betting $69.