It’s bad news for long-time PlayStation fans, as Sony has confirmed the new console won’t support PS1, PS2, or PS3 games.
That’s not to say you have to get rid of your impressive collection of PlayStation games – perhaps spanning back to when you unveiled your very first console back in the 90s – but you’ll probably just have to accept that by the end of this month it’s likely they’ll be starting to gather dust.
The PlayStation 5 is set to launch on November 12 in the US, Japan, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, before releasing across the rest of the world on November 19, when fans will finally have chance to boot up the highly anticipated console and see what it has to offer.
While it will give gamers access to streaming services and an impressive user experience, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan confirmed that one thing it won’t be offering is total backwards compatibility.
Speaking during an interview with Japanese gaming mag Famitsu, via Siliconera, he explained the PS5 development team didn’t have the time to implement the feature for older PlayStation systems.
He commented:
We keep in mind the engineering specialised 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.
However, don’t worry about having to say goodbye to all your old games, as the CEO has confirmed that the new console will be able to run 99% of PlayStation 4 games.
