The president of Sony Interactive Entertainment confirms that PlayStation 5 will not be backward compatible with the first 3 generations of PlayStation consoles.
New news about PS5 and the PlayStation ecosystem continues to arrive after last night’s presentation by Sony in which both the final prices and the launch dates of the two versions of PlayStation 5 that will soon reach the market were confirmed. So much so, that after echoing us today that the new Sony console will be backwards compatible with 99% of the PS4 catalog, now it is Jim Ryan himself, president of Sony Interactive Entertainment, who confirms that PS5 will not be backwards compatible with games from PSX, PS2 and PS3; only with PlayStation 4.
Jim Ryan justifies total non-backward compatibility
Thus, and through an interview with the Japanese portal Famitsu and collected by the Siliconera medium, Jim Ryan himself has justified the absence of a full backward compatibility of PS5 with the PlayStation ecosystem, remaining only with PS4 and discarding previous platforms, as they are the first PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3. According to Ryan, the development team has not had enough time to make full backward compatibility with all PlayStation systems of the past a reality.
“We take into account specialized engineering for PS5 while we produce the machine. In the midst of all that, PS4 already has 100 million players; We thought they should be able to play PS4 games on PS5 as well, so we included backward compatibility with PS4. By implementing that we also focused our efforts on incorporating the high-speed SSD and the new DualSense controller. So, unfortunately, we didn’t have time to achieve an implementation of that kind of backward compatibility, ”explains Ryan in reference to the rest of the PlayStation platforms.
Recall that Ubisoft already advanced at the end of last August that its PSX, PS2 and PS3 video games would not be backward compatible with PS5, information that hours later was withdrawn. Now, finally, it is confirmed that PS5 will only be backward compatible with PS4 games.
