Sony still keeps many secrets of PS5 . The company has not yet revealed the design of the console, as well as what games we will see in it, its price , or its specific release date . Also, backward compatibility will be a great differentiating feature between PS5 and Xbox Series X , where Sony has only stated that it will guarantee backward compatibility with PS4 and not with previous consoles.
Running Xbox 360 games on Xbox One is something that many did not believe possible, but Microsoft managed to reverse engineer the Xbox 360 chips and basically completely emulate its components on Xbox One using a virtual GPU that makes the game believe which is running on the original console. In addition, improvements at the level of resolution or frames per second can be applied.
In this way, Microsoft managed to create an emulator for its console despite using a completely different architecture (PowerPC vs x86-64). In the case of the original Xbox, despite using an Intel x86 processor and an NVIDIA GPU, the 64-bit titles had to be recompiled. Additionally, Xbox 360 used an item called Fusion to run titles from the previous console, and some of those items were ported to Xbox One X for backward compatibility. This will also come to Xbox Series X, so that games from the previous three consoles can be run.
PS5 backward compatibility will be very limited
In the case of Sony, unfortunately, the low backward compatibility has received criticism from users, since instead of working on an emulation system to ensure backward compatibility, the company has decided to release remasters or remakes of its titles, so that the original copies could not be used and had to be bought again.
With PS4 that will no longer be so, since it is confirmed that there will be thousands of PS4 games compatible with PS5 , where the company is checking that as many as possible work correctly as we get closer to launch. It is very logical that PS4 games work with PS5, since the architecture of the consoles is exactly the same. But Sony could go a step further and ensure the compatibility of previous games without having to resort to remastering.
DRM and licensing issues – far from the issue
Marc-André Jutras, a developer at the company Cradle Games (creator of games like Hellpoint), made an interesting comment regarding the backward compatibility of PS5, and states that one of the main drawbacks that exist is authorization. In other words, it is difficult for Sony to obtain permission for old games for many reasons, and they would have problems selling them again in their online stores because many of the companies that developed them no longer exist. Furthermore, it claims that some consoles have DRM at the hardware level that prevent current consoles from reading old disks. But it is Sony itself that could skip that DRM, since in current emulators that is already done.
Therefore, this explanation is somewhat unusual and is far from justifying that Sony does not offer backward compatibility with its consoles. We’ll have to keep settling for remastered versions of exclusive console titles, as older multis will still be better played on Xbox.