PS5: 10 Ways It Will Change Gaming Forever
3. We Want To Play Old Games - Backwards Compatibility
One aspect of the current generation that Microsoft gets several hearty back-pats for... is backwards-compatibility. Whilst Sony remarked that “nobody wanted to play old games”, Microsoft beavered away at making their older game catalogue playable in one place.
But, Sony took it on the chin, and thankfully backtracked on that initial stance - people do indeed want to play old games (and, given the popularity of remasters these days, I’d argue some’d rather play old games over new ones).
As a result, PS5 will be backwards-compatible, and though thus far we know that this feature extends to PS4 games, I wouldn’t think it too outrageous that they’d endeavour to make their previous generations compatible too (because who wouldn’t want to play Kula World, Herdy Gerdy, Lair, Gravity Rush 2 and Uncharted 5 on the same console?).
This move means you don’t need to rebuy the games you already own to play them again, a sentiment shared by the idea of “next-gen patches” - if you buy certain games such as Ghosts of Tsushima on your PS4, you’ll get a free patch to boost it when you play it on PS5.
We like to play old games, but we love free stuff.