Several PlayStation 3 games have been reportedly spotted on the PlayStation 5 PSN service causing speculation that the system could be seeing further backward compatibility than just the PlayStation 4 games the system can currently run. This news shortly follows that of a patent filed by Sony, listing PS5 lead designer Mark Cerny, that further suggests that the system will be getting more backward compatibility.
Being reported by VGC, the PS3 Team Ninja fighting game Dead or Alive 5 was recently spotted on the store being listed at £7.99 instead of directing players to the PlayStation Now service as it had previously done. Other users have also seen noted similar listings for the PS3 Bejewelled, as well as Prince of Persia, games The Forgotten Sands and The Two Thrones, each having their own listing price.
At the time of reporting this, the listing is no longer up, with this listing potentially a mistake on the part of Sony. However, there is reason to suspect that something more is going on here.
In that patent filed by Cerny, it was stated they could achieve “backward compatibility through the use of spoof clock and fine grain frequency control.” Rumors and speculation among fans are that Sony has finally solved the compatibility issues with PlayStation 3 titles, something that was an issue for the company when moving into the PlayStation 4.
On top of this, there are rumors suggesting that PlayStation is working on a competitor to Xbox’s Game Pass. While not a one-to-one competitor, with day one, releases not something Sony plans to do according to this, it would replace the PlayStation Now service and be included with a monthly subscription on PlayStations Online service. According to rumors, the service will have 3 tiers with the highest gain access to a list of older games from across all generations of PlayStation Consoles.
If this is to believe, it is possible that Sony plans to integrate PlayStation 3 games into PSN alongside this service, codenamed Sparticus. Only time will tell if all of this is connected in some way, but it should be interesting to see what Sony has in store for the future.
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A Nintendo Switch trailer was also released.
According to SteamDB.
An announcement trailer was also released.