Sony confirms PlayStation 5 won't natively support PS3, PS2, PS1 games
Console yourself.
Sony has now confirmed PlayStation 5 will not natively support PS3, PS2 and PS1 discs.
It's not a huge surprise, and a now-removed Ubisoft claim stated as much earlier this month, but it is the first time Sony has plainly said as much on the record.
Speaking to Famitsu (via Ars Technica), PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said the new console was designed to focus on PS5-specific engineering, although it was still important to support PS4 backwards compatibility since it has 100m players.
"We have been building devices with a focus on PS5-specific engineering," Ryan said. "Among them, PS4 already has 100 million players, so I thought that I would like to play PS4 titles on PS5 as well, so I introduced PS4 compatibility. While achieving that, we focused on incorporating high-speed SSDs and the new controller DualSense in parallel. So, unfortunately, compatibility with [PS3, PS2, PS1] has not been achieved."
This week, Sony said it would support "99 per cent" of PlayStation 4 games via backwards compatibility, though it remains a little unclear how many of these will be supported immediately at launch. Will you just be able to pop any old PS4 disc in? Which games won't be supported? PlayStation is yet to go into any firm details.
PlayStation Plus owners will, however, get a collection of top-rated PS4 games to play on PS5 when the console launches as part of their subscription. The scheme is called the PlayStation Plus Collection, and it contains games such as Days Gone, Detroit: Become Human, Fallout 4, Final Fantasy XV, God of War and The Last Guardian.
