Game Developer Explains Why PlayStation 5 May Not Be Backward Compatible for Previous Console Games

PlayStation 5 will play a majority of PS4 games, but will it be backward compatible for all of the previous consoles? There’s been no word yet.

Marc-Andre Jutras, who is the technical director at Cradle Games explains why the fifth PlayStation console may not run games from PS3, PS2, and PS1:

“As a gamer, it’s hard to figure out what’s the big deal with this. How come PS5 isn’t backward compatible with PS4, 3, 2, 1? If I can find some emulator for all those, and the new consoles are as powerful as a good gaming PC, then there’s no reason for all those games to not run, even with glitches. I wish they could just find a way to deal with it and just cover everything, even if not perfectly.”

Jutras continued:

“As a developer, however, I can see where some legal stuff could get a bit blurry, especially if the goal is to have those older gamers sold in some stores,” said the technical director “Some companies don’t exist anymore and licenses of those titles might not be so easy to figure out. I also understand that older consoles might have some form of hardware DRM that could prevent newer consoles from reading older disks. To be honest, I just wish backward compatibility wasn’t a novel thing and just an expected feature, covering all titles.”

What do you think about Jutras’ comments? Can we safely retire our older game consoles or must we keep them in order to play the games we love, due to them not being compatible with the latest generation?

Source: CB


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