If you’re one of the few who are still holding on to the hope of the PlayStation 5 being able to run legacy titles, it’s time to let go. In a recent interview with legendary gaming magazine Famitsu, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan (yeah, that guy again) confirmed that Sony’s next-gen system won’t include backward compatibility with PS1, PS2, and PS3 titles. While the PS5 will presumably support certain classics sold on the PlayStation Store (e.g., Jak and Daxter, Red Dead Revolver), users will not be able to put those old discs to use.
“We have been building devices with PS5 specific engineering in mind,” explained Ryan (machine translation). “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 them has not been achieved.”
Basically, it sounds like Sony never bothered because it had plenty of other priorities in mind. The good news is that the PlayStation 5 should launch with comprehensive PS4 support – 99 percent, apparently – so early adopters will still have plenty to play on top of next-gen launch titles such as Demon’s Souls ($69.99) and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales ($49.99).