Sony Confirms PS1, PSP Trophy Support Is Optional, Up to the Developer

@Bentleyma I'm really hoping for a strong RPG line up on Premium as time goes on. As much as I love PS1 games, so many of them play terribly by today's standards. At least with a lot of RPGs, we've got turn based combat. Makes them much easier to stomach!

Shame. They are mandated for every game on PS3/4/5/V post-2007 and the technology to add them to old games is clearly available, so why not extend the mandate to PS1/2PSP re-releases as well?

Hopefully the majority of Plus partners will make use of the option even without Sony forcing them.

It'll be interesting to see whether trophy classics get played more than vanilla classics. Then again, we won't really know if it's because of the trophies or because people would rather play good games like Wild Arms over games like Worms.

Why no mention of Trophies for PS2 games.

So we just booooh the devs that don't include it? Gotcha

Bummer. I have other means of playing Playstation One games if they have no trophies. The trophies are just about the only thing the service can do that other sources would be unable to replicate. Needless to say, I'll probably only be focusing on the games that actually have trophies.

@Golem25
The intention is to not slow down and/or stop the roll out of classic games. By making trophies mandatory, there will be many games not able to be on the service. Additionally, the addition of games to the service would be so slow as all the current legal and technical hurdles that currently exist still would, but there is an additional hurdle of waiting for developers to add trophies whenever they feel like it.

I would expect that more and more developers will include Trophy support as the releases pick up. It wouldn’t take too much effort to include them surely! I would love to see releases and support for Metal Gear Solid 1, Tekken 2, Silent Hill and anything related to Capcom incidentally!!

The devs that dont do them are obviously just lazy.

Unfortunately some of those studios don't exist any more. Or don't own the IP anymore.

@Snake_V5 Because the only PS2 Games available are the Remasters that are already on PS4

This is the correct approach. Making it optional will mean more games will hit the service, whereas mandating trophy support would significantly reduce what we receive

@Rob_230 I was going to comment this exact thing.

Additionally I will add, I'd rather devs focus on getting the games working properly over trophy support

@Rob_230 Says who? I love how we've just made up this argument on the hypothetical basis that it's somehow difficult or time-consuming for devs to add trophy support.

@AndyKazama You think devs who are too lazy to add trophy support will spend a significant amount of time fixing anything, lol?

@Ken_Kaniff the confidence with which certain people make statements about things they know nothing about never ceases to amaze me.

@guntam i'm sure its more difficult than you make out, and its not necessarily going to be financially rewarding to code trophy support into titles not designed to have it. You're argument is equally hypothetical because you are making it out that its as easy as flipping a switch, when in reality whole lines of code would need to be rewritten to include trophy triggers, and then quality tested to ensure this hasn't broken something else.

And also there are many studios that developed PS1 games that either no longer exist and the ip is owned by different companies that dont necessarily develop games. They won't be prepared to resource implementing trophy support if there is only likely to be a small financial reward.

If they can be paid a small fee to licence the game out to PS Plus without the need to do anything else then why wouldnt they. For this reason, I 100% believe we'll see more games as a result of Sony not mandating trophy support.

But opinions and all that.

@AndyKazama 100% this!

@Rob_230 "financially rewarding"? When are trophies ever "financially rewarding"? Ironically, this instance is the only time trophies could in fact be financially rewarding, by giving nostalgic gamers an incentive to subscribe to the new service to platinum their old faves. Not to mention many of those old games have a legacy now that can be drawn on for trophy inspiration.

I never suggested it was easy, you suggested it was hard, and I suggested you had no idea. Realistically, for a game developer, I'd be more inclined to believe it's not going to be some great behemoth of a task.

Yeah, sure, studios that don't exist/IPs that aren't owned by the same companies anymore obviously can't add trophies. That doesn't have anything to do with this.

Your conclusion just isn't based on very much, but hey, opinions indeed.

@naruball I'm guessing your the expert in trophy implementation then? Why don't you go ahead and break it down for me since I seem to not get it from your perspective.

@Ken_Kaniff R.I.P., reading comprehension. No, if I were an expert or a pseudoexpert, I would act like an expert, which I didn't. That was all you.

Edit: as others have said, some games were made by companies that no longer exist (super lazy of them, I know), or they no longer have the rights to the IPs.

Places I worked then coding trophies in was fairly easy, and 9 times out of 10 they worked right out of the box. The problem is that if you code it, you have to test it, and that means essentially paying teams of testers to spend the time to achieve the platinum for your game in every possible way to make sure things work, so less than a person-hour's effort of writing code results in hundreds of person-hours of effort in testing, and then if bugs are found, hundreds more hours of re-testing.

@Bentleyma Wow, Brave Fencer Mussashi I would buy day one!! ALWAYS wanted to play it, since the demo disc on PS1, but never found the game.

@theheadofabroom Thanks for some actual insight, it trumps the total blind guesses of everyone else who has commented.

That being said, what you're describing is a process every company who has released any game on a PlayStation console in the last 15ish years has had to do. Surely they have structures in place to tackle this efficiently.

@Golem25 because if it required effort then the publishers wouldn’t bother putting them up

@guntam sure, it's just that generally you do it during development of the game, when you're going to have to do a lot of testing anyway. In these cases though you've got a game that's in a known good state (any existing bugs are part of the retro experience of playing that game, and are probably part of a known strategy), and an emulator which one would assume is tested against the actual hardware, so there's no likely much testing required for each individual game. As soon as you add trophy support you're either changing the game's code, or changing how the emulator interacts with that game, so you go from needing to do a cursory "kick the tires", if that, to needing to test everything.

It's not that it can't be done, but that it's expensive.

@naruball I was also gonna say that a lot of the companies are no longer around, got merged, bought out then dispersed, or just straight up no longer own the rights too.

@naruball Obviously reading comprehension isn't your strong suit either. Because I said "the devs that dont do it are lazy". Never did i mention devs that don't have access to the games.

Example for you: Oddworld Inhabitants has the rights to Abe's Oddysee but were to lazy to implement trophies. Hope that's clear for you now.