Sony has now confirmed PlayStation 5 will not natively support PS3, PS2 and PS1 discs.
It’s not a huge surprise, and a now-removed Ubisoft claim stated as much earlier this month, but it is the first time Sony has plainly said as much on the record.
Speaking to Famitsu (via Ars Technica), PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said the new console was designed to focus on PS5-specific engineering, although it was still important to support PS4 backwards compatibility since it has 100m players.
“We have been building devices with a focus on PS5-specific engineering,” Ryan said. “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 [PS3, PS2, PS1] has not been achieved.”