Although the company didn’t elaborate on how far back the PS5 Backward Compatibility would go.
Speaking during their recent quarterly financial earnings call, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot discussed briefly about next-gen consoles, empathizing on the importance of backwards compatibility on the new systems.
Those consoles will be running almost all the back catalog of the previous consoles. It will be something new in the industry. It will help the old generations to continue to be big consoles on the market for years to come
The statement is pretty vague in it’s meaning, especially with the PlayStation 5 since everyone assumes the system will be able to play, in the very least, all PS4 titles when it releases. Still, the use of the word “almost” indicates that there may be some titles not being compatible with the systems. Sony hasn’t revealed any plans or released any official statement concerning it, though current rumors suggest that the PlayStation 5 will indeed be able to play games not just from the PlayStation 4 era, but as far back as the original PlayStation 1. We aren’t sure how they are hoping to accomplish this, but with modders capable of developing a PS3 emulator we don’t see how the guys behind the system won’t be able to do it even better.
- Related Reading: Sony Launches PlayStation 5 Official Website, States They’re Still Not Ready for Reveal
As for Microsoft, it’s safe to assume the support for old titles stretching as far back as the original Xbox will continue to grow going into next-gen as they have been really supportive of the feature during this generation. Phil Spencer himself stated the reason behind next-gen Xbox being named Xbox is because they want the system to be the best place to play all Xbox titles as they look for ways to improve old titles with newer specs. So backward compatibility is without a question going to play a major role for Microsoft next-gen.
Source: Ubisoft Earning Call via PlayStation LifeStyle