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Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida announced this week that Sony's upcoming console, the PlayStation 4, will be able to play PS3 titles via the Gaikai game cloud streaming service.

Sony acquired game streaming service Gaikai in 2012, and since then, rumors have persisted about the PS4's cloud streaming gaming capabilities. When Sony announced that the PS4 will indeed support Gaikai streaming during the official PS4 announcement, the next question became whether PS3 backwards compatibility, which is not a standard feature of the PS4, could be offered via the streaming service.

Gaikai and other cloud streaming game services render the game's content remotely, allowing the game player to play advanced games on relatively inexpensive hardware. The same technique can allow games to be playable on normally incompatible hardware, for example to play PS3 games on the PS4.

Sony's latest announcement at the Tokyo Game Show seems to confirm that pseudo PS3 compatibility can be provided for the PS4, via the Gaikai service.

The same set of streamable PS3 games will also be available to PS3 and Vita consoles.

"We are planning to start serving PS3 games on cloud servers in the States next year for PS4, PS3 and PS Vita," said Yoshida. "And as far as content is concerned, the first games that will exist will be PS3 games. We'd like to offer a variety of games, because with video services like Netflix or Hulu, you just want to browse through different movies, watch five minutes and if you're bored you can move on to something else - and that's part of the fun.

"But we have to make sure that the game can work through the internet, so we have to go through certification for each title. So we'll start with a certain number of titles and gradually expand the library."

It is unknown at the moment if existing owners of the streamable games will get free streaming access to the same games, or be offered some kind of rebate.