Sony’s PS5 breakdown may have been focused on the specs of the upcoming system, but it did touch on at least one aspect that is important to a lot of people: backwards compatibility. Mark Cerny initially stated that the PS5 will play a lot of the top 100 PS4 games. However, now Sony is stating that the PS5 backwards compatibility with extend to an “overwhelming majority” of the 4,000 or so PS4 titles.
Sony gave this updated number on the PlayStation Blog post detailing the hardware specs that talked about PS4 games running and looking better on the PS5 as well as looking at specific games that might need tweaks by their developer. In this update, Sony said the following:
“With all of the amazing games in PS4’s catalog, we’ve devoted significant efforts to enable our fans to play their favorites on PS5. We believe that the overwhelming majority of the 4,000+ PS4 titles will be playable on PS5. We’re expecting backward compatible titles will run at a boosted frequency on PS5 so that they can benefit from higher or more stable frame rates and potentially higher resolutions. We’re currently evaluating games on a title-by-title basis to spot any issues that need adjustment from the original software developers.”
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The post also explains that Cerny used the aforementioned top 100 PS4 list as a signal of how well the backwards compatibility effort is going, even if we don’t know what specific games have been tested. Apparently, Sony has already tested hundreds of titles — a number that will grow extend to thousands before launch — and we will hear more updates on backward compatibility in the future.
However, it’s not clear if these future updates will extend to PS3, PS2, or PS1 titles at all. There was plenty of speculation stating that the PS5 would play almost every PlayStation game, but Sony has been mum on that possibility. Hopefully, it is in the cards since Microsoft has made its backwards compatibility efforts quite clear starting with the Xbox One. The Xbox Series X will be able to play a ton of old games starting at the original Xbox. It would look rather unfortunate for Sony’s backwards compatibility efforts to only stretch back one generation. But there is still time.
