Home / Software & Gaming / Console / PS5 backwards compatibility won’t extend to PS1, PS2, and PS3 games

PS5 backwards compatibility won’t extend to PS1, PS2, and PS3 games

In the past week, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s President and CEO Jim Ryan confirmed that the PS5 will be compatible with 99% of the PS4 games, but the console's compatibility with PS1, PS2, and PS3 titles wasn't mentioned. It is now known that despite having backwards compatibility with older titles, it won't be extended beyond PS4 titles, leaving out PS1, PS2, and PS3.

In Famitsu's interview with Jim Ryan (via Siliconera), following the PS5 Showcase event, the Sony Interactive Entertainment’s President and CEO stated that the 100 million PS4 players “would like to play PS4 titles on PS5”, so adding PS4 compatibility to the PS5 would be a good idea. While working on PS5's backwards compatibility, the development team “focused on incorporating high-speed SSDs and the new controller “DualSense” in parallel”, meaning that, unfortunately, compatibility with legacy titles “has not been achieved”.

Unlike PS5, its rival Xbox Series X will be compatible with Xbox One games and peripherals, and Xbox 360 and the original Xbox games, all of them with improved visuals and stability.

PS5 might not be compatible with PS1, PS2, and PS3 games, but you can still play most of them through Playstation Now, Sony's cloud gaming subscription. This service features over 700 PS2, PS3 and PS4 games that you can stream to PS5, PS4, or PC.

KitGuru says: What do you all think of Sony's backwards compatibility efforts? Should more have been done, or is relying on cloud streaming for older games a good enough solution? 

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Lies of P Plus

Lies of P headlines August’s PlayStation Plus Essential line-up

Sony has announced its PlayStation Plus Essential line-up for August, including the souls-like Lies of P; the open-world survival game Day Z and more.

We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker.

Thank you for visiting KitGuru. Our news and reviews teams work hard to bring you the latest stories and finest, in-depth analysis.

We want to be as informative as possible – and to help our readers make the best buying decisions. The mechanism we use to run our business and pay some of the best journalists in the world, is advertising.

If you want to support KitGuru, then please add www.kitguru.net to your ad blocking whitelist or disable your adblocking software. It really makes a difference and allows us to continue creating the kind of content you really want to read.

It is important you know that we don’t run pop ups, pop unders, audio ads, code tracking ads or anything else that would interfere with the KitGuru experience. Adblockers can actually block some of our free content, such as galleries!