The writing was on the wall, but Sony has now officially confirmed that the PS5 console will not support old PS1, PS3 and PS3 games. That means the backward compatibility that the console boasts about is only applicable to PS4 games. PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan has said in an interview that the console’s development team didn’t have enough time to implement backward compatibility for the company’s older generations of consoles.
Ryan was speaking to Famitsu (via GameSpot) when he said, “We keep in mind the engineering specialized for the PS5, as we produced the device. In the midst of that, the PS4 already has 100 million players; we thought they ought to want to play PS4 titles on the PS5 as well indeed, so we included compatibility with the PS4. While implementing that, we also focused our efforts on taking in the high-speed SSD and the new controller DualSense at the same time. So, unfortunately, we couldn’t reach the implementation of such compatibilities.”
This is in stark contrast to what the Xbox Series X and Series S are capable of playing Xbox One games as well as select Xbox 360 and original Xbox games. Ryan has said in his interview that the PS5 will have 99 percent compatibility with all PS4 games. Sony also a PS Plus Collection recently, which will provide a chunk of popular PS4 games at launch to every PS5 owner with a PS Plus membership.
The PS5 will be released on November 12 in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. As for other countries, they will start getting them from November 19 onwards. The less expensive PS5 Digital Edition will be priced at $399, while the disc drive-inclusive variant will go for $499.