Sony has posted a new page on their official PlayStation support website confirming which PS4 titles were tested and will not work with backwards compatibility on the upcoming PlayStation 5 – and it’s a short list of low profile names.
According to the company the overwhelming majority of the 4,000+ PS4 games are playable on PS5 consoles with many of them already tested. Also, just like with the Xbox Series X, certain games (namely frame uncapped ones) will benefit from the PS5 console’s Game Boost allowing them to run at higher or smoother frame rates.
However ten games in particular will not work at all on the PS5, the most high profile being the mobile game “Hitman GO: Definitive Edition” and “Shadow Complex Remastered”. Others that won’t transfer over: “DWVR,” “Afro Samurai 2 Revenge of Kuma Volume One,” “TT Isle of Man – Ride on the Edge 2,” “Just Deal With It!,” “Robinson: The Journey,” “We Sing,” “Shadwen” and “Joe’s Diner”.
It’s likely this isn’t the full list as testing is ongoing, and Sony confirms that games that won’t work on PS5 will be tagged on the PlayStation Store as ‘Playable on: PS4 only’. PlayStation advises that on those titles that work, some functionalities that were available on the PS4 console may not be available on PS5s and some could exhibit errors or unexpected behavior.
As much as backwards compatibility is widely touted as being the strength of rival platforms, a hard fact is getting some old games to work on modern systems is incredibly difficult and many simply won’t run without either massive modifications on PC or major updates from developers on console. Sony’s page makes no mention of PS3, PS2, or PS1 backwards compatibility suggesting there will be none beyond those titles directly remastered for PS4 (ala “The Last of Us,” “Shadow of the Colossus”) or being remade/remastered for PS5 (eg. “Demon’s Souls”).
Rival Microsoft has the obvious advantage here, touting backwards compatibility for all its previous gens as a key differentiating feature. Certainly it’s expected essentially every game that worked on Xbox One will work on Xbox Series X with only the odd outlier.
Going beyond that though it gets trickier. Xbox’s own backwards compatibility section of its website indicates only 39 of the 1001 original Xbox titles are compatible with the current Xbox One, as are just 568 of the 2085 titles for Xbox 360 with just 69 titles across both gens having been ‘optimised’ for Xbox One X.
Still, those 600 or so titles that are backwards compatible should also translate over to the Xbox Series X meaning it will remain the only real place to play some high profile older titles from third parties like “Red Dead Redemption” and SSX 3″” to its own old exclusives like “Gears of War 2” and “Crackdown”.
Both consoles are set to hit stores next month.