Sony Backwards Compatibility: What PlayStation Said

I can’t find anyone at Sony saying that running old PlayStation games on new hardware was impossible. What Sony has said, across 19 years, is that the chips cost money, that the engineers were busy, that people didn’t use the feature much, and that the old games looked ancient. Most of those are decisions rather than limits, and that gap is the whole story, because fans have spent the same 19 years testing where the real limits are.

The closest Sony came to saying it couldn’t be done

The nearest thing on record is from April 2013, as the PS4 was being explained. Masayasu Ito of Sony told the Japanese site AV Watch that playing PS3 games would have needed the Cell chip inside the new console. In the English translation GameRevolution carried, Ito added: “Currently, it’s not possible to simulate this via software.”

“Currently” is doing a lot in that sentence, and the rest of the answer matters too. Ito said Sony could still make Cell if it wanted to, and that the bigger worry was supporting hardware that would get harder to buy. Mark Cerny, the PS4’s lead architect, said of the same call: “We struggled with this point.” Moving to x86 made life far easier for developers. That was a fair engineering trade, and nobody should pretend the PS3 was an easy machine to carry forward.

How the PS3 lost the PS2

The early record is about money. Gamasutra reported that around 98 percent of PS1 and PS2 games worked on American and Japanese PS3s. Then in February 2007, ahead of the European launch, Sony confirmed a change to the hardware: “we have removed the Emotion Engine, retaining the graphics chip.” Compatibility in Europe would lean on software instead. Michael Ephraim, who ran Sony’s Australian business, was candid about why: “Clearly cost is one of the [reasons].”

By October 2007 the reason had moved. The 40GB PS3 dropped PS2 games altogether, and the European announcement said this reflected “the reduced emphasis placed on this feature amongst later purchasers of PS3”. Nick Sharples of Sony Europe gave a different answer to Joystiq, saying “our engineering resources are now focused on developing new and innovative features”. The American press release that month simply said the model “will no longer play” PS2 titles.

In August 2009 John Koller, Sony’s director of hardware marketing, closed the matter: “It’s not coming back.” So in under three years, customers heard about cost, then demand, then engineering time. All three can be true at once, but none of them says the thing couldn’t be done, because earlier PS3s were already doing it.

Selling it back as a product

Streaming was the next answer. Sony announced PlayStation Now at CES on the 7th of January 2014, offering PS3 games streamed from its servers. Then on the 5th of December 2015 a PS2 line-up arrived on the PS4 store, with trophies and “up-rendered 1080p”. So the PS4 could run PS2 games after all, one purchase at a time. I think that’s the honest shape of Sony’s position since: compatibility as a feature gets described as unwanted, and compatibility as a product gets a price.

The most quoted line in all of this came in June 2017, when Time raised the PS2 library with Jim Ryan, then Sony’s global sales chief. Ryan said backwards compatibility was “much requested, but not actually used much”. Then came the Gran Turismo event, where the PS1 and PS2 games “looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?”

Four years later, as PlayStation’s chief executive, Ryan told Axios the point had been how far the series had come: “I certainly wasn’t trying to be disrespectful to our heritage.” VGC’s report of that interview also carries the most useful sentence any Sony executive has offered on this topic: “time, engineering resource, and money are all finite”. That’s the real answer, and it would have saved a lot of bother in 2007.

The PS5 drew a line at the PS4

To be fair to Sony, the PS5’s work on PS4 games was serious. The PlayStation Blog said in March 2020 that the “overwhelming majority” of more than 4,000 PS4 titles would be playable, and its launch FAQ put it at more than 99%. The same FAQ answered the older question in one line: “No, PS5 will play PS5 games and more than 99% of PS4 games, including PlayStation VR games, only.”

The catalogue came in March 2022, when PlayStation Now was folded into PlayStation Plus. The Premium tier offered PS1, PS2 and PSP games to stream or download, and “PS3 games available via cloud streaming”.

The PlayStation Plus logo above its three tiers, Essential, Extra and Premium. Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment, Official image.

That’s still how it stands. The Sixth Axis noted on the 11th of October that PS3 games can only be streamed, not on PlayStation Portal, and that classics arrive at about one or two a month. Why PS3 games stay streaming only is unclear, as the same piece says.

The older shops are going too. In 2021 Sony planned to close the PS3 and Vita stores, and Ryan reversed that on the 19th of April with the words “we made the wrong decision here”. On the 1st of July this year it decided again. Those stores close in July 2027 in most countries, starting earlier in some, with Sony saying the old machines can’t support updated payment systems. Past purchases can still be downloaded “for the foreseeable future”. The same day, Sony said new PlayStation games would stop coming on disc from January 2028. Anyone with a working PS3 keeps what they bought. Anyone without one gets the streaming catalogue, if the game is in it.

What fans did with the same machines

This started before the PS3 existed. In 1999 Sony took on two commercial PS1 emulators, Connectix’s Virtual Game Station and Bleem. It lost the important rounds in America. In 2000 the Ninth Circuit found that the copies Connectix made while reverse engineering Sony’s BIOS were protected fair use, and in a separate case it found Bleem’s comparison screenshots were fair use too. Those are American rulings on particular facts. Whether a given project is legal depends on what it does and where you are, and neither case was about sharing games.

Today’s projects are unofficial and run by volunteers. The decompilation explainer covers how that side of the scene works. The main PS3 emulator is the best measure of Sony’s old problem. Its own tracker counted 73.06% of the PS3 library as playable in February, on modern PCs. Cell really is hard, though. Digital Foundry said in 2024 that PS3 games leaning heavily on Cell’s SPUs would suffer on the PS5, naming Killzone 2, so a clean answer for the whole library may not exist.

Fans are testing that on the PS5 itself, which needs a jailbroken or otherwise modified console. In May, Digital Citizen reported footage of MotorStorm: Pacific Rift appearing to run smoothly through a PS3 emulator on a PS5. That’s one game in one clip. This month, Notebookcheck reported that a homebrew emulator can read original PS2 DVDs through a jailbroken PS5’s own drive, saving a copy first. CD-based PS2 games don’t work.

How Sony has answered

The big lawsuit came in 2011, when Sony sued George Hotz over PS3 security information posted online, saying it could be used to circumvent the console’s protections and allow pirated games. Hotz denied wrongdoing, and the case settled on terms including a permanent injunction, with Sony’s general counsel Riley Russell saying the aim was “to protect our intellectual property and our consumers”. A year earlier Sony had removed the PS3’s Install Other OS option “due to security concerns”, taking away a feature older PS3s had shipped with.

On fan work, the documented enforcement has been around Sony’s games rather than its old consoles. In early 2025 the firm MarkScan went after a 60fps Bloodborne patch and a video of a PS1-style Bloodborne demake, according to their creators, with no public explanation from Sony that I’ve seen. Nor have I seen any report of Sony taking legal action against the main PS3 emulator.

The PS5 is where it’s live now. A public jailbreak appeared on the 29th of September. Sony’s notes for firmware 14.10 say only: “We’ve made some security fixes to the system software.” It didn’t link those to any exploit. Notebookcheck reported on the 15th of October, based on owners’ posts, that consoles below 14.10 were being kept off PSN. A homebrew storefront offering more than 1,600 free PS4 and PS5 games went offline after a reported cease and desist, unconfirmed by Sony, and clones appeared soon after. Tom’s Hardware also reported a researcher being paid a $50,000 bounty after reporting a hypervisor bug to Sony.

Sony hasn’t said these updates have anything to do with old games, and I don’t think they do. I think the target is piracy and security, which any console maker would act on, and a storefront of free PS5 games is exactly what that looks like. But homebrew emulators need the same holes, so the people trying to play a PS2 disc they own get shut out along with everyone else. Sony could change that by offering an official route, and it has told us why it mostly hasn’t. Time, engineering and money are finite, and it spent them elsewhere.