Sony’s PlayStation 5 won’t be able to support every PlayStation 4 game when it launches later this year. That could well mean PSVR support is selective, too.
Mark Cerny, Lead System Architect of the PS5, confirmed as much in the deep dive video of the PS5 Sony put out today. “Running PS4 and PS4 titles at boosted frequencies has also added complexity,” Cerny explained. “The boost is truly massive this time around and some game code just can’t handle it. Testing has to be done on a title by title basis.”
That sounds like some PS4 games just flat out won’t run on PS5. But Sony does expect a wide range of PS4 games to be supported. “Results are excellent, though,” Cerny continued. “We recently took a look at the top 100 PlayStation 4 titles as ranked by playtime and we’re expecting almost all of them to be playable at launch on PlayStation 5.”
Sony confirmed PS5 would be backwards compatible with PS4 last year. Not only that, but the company confirmed that the original PSVR headset worked with PS5 too. Adding two and two together, we had hoped that would mean you’d be able to play all of your PSVR games on PS5, perhaps at improved fidelity with new updates. We’re still yet to see exactly how those hopes pan out, but it certainly doesn’t seem like every PSVR game will be available at this point in time. We’ve reached out to Sony to clarify.
Still, backwards compatibility is on one small part of the PS5 VR story. There was no mention of a PSVR 2 today, but we know Sony is prototyping a new headset. Hopefully we’ll learn more soon.
