In a Wednesday interview, Sony Interactive Entertainment chief Jim Ryan confirmed that the upcoming PlayStation 5 console won’t natively support PS1, PS2, or PS3 game; Ryan explained that “PS5-specific engineering” meant the design team was mostly focused on “the simultaneous use of high-speed SSDs and the new DualSense controller.” Speaking with Japanese gaming bible Famitsu, he made clear that Sony wanted to support PlayStation 4’s “100 million players” by developing compatibility with “99%” of PS4 games, since “we thought that they would like to play PS4 titles on the PS5, as well.”

The announcement doesn’t clarify whether PS1 games purchased for use on PS4 will transfer to PS5.

It also doesn’t mention the existing ability for players to stream older-generation games to PS4 from the PlayStation Now cloud-subscription service or whether we should expect that functionality to seamlessly transfer to PS5 in November.

Wednesday’s PlayStation 5 news didn’t go into further detail about additional boosts to PS4 games as played on the upcoming console. Instead, we learned that some major PlayStation 5 games, particularly Horizon: Forbidden West and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, will launch simultaneously on PS5 and PS4.

This appears to run somewhat counter to Sony’s recent comments about maintaining “generations” instead of supporting an Xbox-style “forward-compatible” plan for its biggest games.

source famitsu.com