A new PlayStation report has good news about PS3 backward compatibility on PS5. The exotic architecture of the PS3 has haunted PlayStation for many years. Not only did it cause developers headaches during the PS3 generation, but it’s been a pain in the side of PlayStation who have been unable to emulate the PS3 on PS4 or PS5, which means backward compatibility has been limited to streaming via PlayStation Now. PlayStation gamers were hopeful this was going to change with the new PlayStation Plus, but that was announced recently with no word of PS3 backward compatibility. That said, according to a new report, PS3 backward compatibility is coming to PS5, though it sounds like it won’t be full backward compatibility and it sounds like it’s been a nightmare for PlayStation to figure out.ย
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The report comes the way of Moore’s Law Is Dead via Sacred Symbols, who claims Sony has been working on cracking the code of PS3 backward compatibility for years and is finally starting to get closer to realizing this hard work. According to Moore’s Law Is Dead, Sony has had to more or less create many different micro emulators within a larger emulator in order to run various games. Why has it had to do this? Well, the report claims because of the PS3 architecture and how various developers had to deploy various tricks and solutions to work with it. So, rather than just create one emulator for all PS3 games, Sony basically has to create special emulation studio by studio. This is not only a lot of work but ensures that when PS3 backward compatibility does arrive, it will be limited, probably largely to first-party. Still some games is better than no games for many PlayStation fans who have been desperate to revisit some of the classic trapped on PS3.
For now, though, this is all unofficial information, which means it should be taken with a grain of salt, but it does line up with other recent rumblings about PS3 backward compatibility being somewhat imminent and that the unique architecture of the PS3 has made PS3 backward compatibility very complicated.ย
At the moment of publishing, PlayStation hasn’t commented on this report, and considering it hasn’t commented on previous PS3 backward compatibility rumors, we don’t expect this to change, but it does, we will update the story accordingly. In the meantime feel free to leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter @Tyler_Fischer_ and let me know which PS3 games you want to see brought forward via backward compatibility if it ends up being limited to a select list of games.ย
