Here Is Why PS5 Is Almost Guaranteed To Be Backwards Compatible
How peeved were you when you purchased your PS4 only to realize that you would now need to find room in your entertainment center for two consoles if you wanted to keep on playing your favorite PS3 games?
If you didn’t find that kind of space, you probably have switched your two consoles in and out every few months. More likely, you cried a little, and then packed away your PS3 in a closet. You might even have splurged on remasters of games you already paid for once before.
Now, to some gamers, this is no big deal—they have cash to burn, and are more interested in new titles anyway.
But to a lot of gamers, it is a travesty. We paid for those old games, they are ours, and we should be able to enjoy them. And a lot of our favorite games are classic titles. We don’t care that the graphics are dated. Great gameplay is great gameplay, period.
Thankfully, we have reason to be optimistic that Sony will allow backwards compatibility on the PS5—a couple of reasons, actually.
Digital Downloading Is a Big Deal These Days
First of all, a lot of gamers nowadays are opting to stop purchasing physical game discs. Instead, they are downloading games directly from the PlayStation Store. Their purchases are stored in the cloud.
This would make it really easy to simply download those old PS4 purchases straight to one’s PS5 someday—if Sony will permit it. And why wouldn’t they? It’d be an easy feature to integrate, and it’d work great.
Microsoft Is Already Ahead of the Game Here
Another reason to make the PS5 backwards compatible is in the interests of winning the console war. For a long time, Sony has had reason to feel confident that it was in the lead, but Microsoft is catching up. Decisions like offering backwards compatibility on the Xbox One while Sony denied it on the PS4 have played into that.
Is Sony really going to take the risk of outraging gamers with the same bad decision twice? It seems more than likely they will follow Microsoft’s lead on this one and offer backwards compatibility.
PS5 Backwards Compatibility Could Make Sony More Money
The last reason why we are likely to see backwards compatibility on PS5 is not so optimistic—and that is that Sony can charge for it. They could opt to make it part of PlayStation Plus. This could drive subscription sign-ups. This would be pretty lame, but you can always trust a big company to pick the lame option if it looks like easy cash.
So is backwards compatibility on PS5 likely? Yes. Will it be available to all gamers, regardless of whether they are PlayStation Plus members? That much is anyone’s guess, but we sure hope so.