PlayStation Teases Backwards Compatibility To Rival Xbox As Thousands Of Games Could Return

PlayStation has produced some of the greatest games ever made since the OG console launched back in 1994, so it’s a shame we can’t access most of them.

At the time of writing, PlayStation Plus Premium is your best bet at replaying the classics outside of re-releases, remasters and remakes.

This comes with the large caveat of PlayStation Plus Premium being ridiculously expensive, and new additions to its retro library are few and far between.

However, PlayStation is actively looking into video game preservation and could be on the cusp of a backwards compatibility programme to rival Xbox.

PlayStation Is Competing With Xbox, Again

Xbox has an impressive collection of backwards-compatible games. Gamers on the Xbox Series X/S can play the latest releases, Xbox 360 games and OG Xbox games either digitally or using physical discs.

After putting the program on ice, Xbox is defrosting it for the 25th anniversary, while PlayStation is making moves to put classic games into the hands of its gamers.

PlayStation’s Senior Build Engineer and IP Preservationist Garrett Fredley has teased some of this work online.

In a post on X, Fredley said: “PlayStation's preservation journey is on its way, and we're not looking to stop anytime soon.

“Being able to share our vision, work, hopes and dreams with Sony leadership was a special moment for our team, and I'm excited to see where we go from here.”

The PlayStation Preservation program is exactly what it sounds like. Sony wants to save and preserve as much of the company’s history as possible, meaning source code, builds and other aspects of game development that are often lost to time.

By preserving all of this, it means games are never truly lost and can either be re-released in the future or used in remasters/remakes.

In the short term, it’s unlikely that PlayStation will use any of this for PlayStation Plus Premium or other such collections, but it might be useful for the PlayStation 6.

Little is known about PlayStation’s next console but rumour has it that it’ll be much more compatible with games that came before it, which hopefully means it’ll run PlayStation 3 games natively rather than the PlayStation 5’s cloud-streamed alternative.

In the long term what Sony’s Preservation Program will actually mean for gamers is more re-releases, remasters and remakes.

On the one hand, this sucks as it means we’ll be paying for games we’ve likely previously owned just for the pleasure of playing them on modern hardware, but if it means a new generation of gamers will have access to them, that’s a silver lining.

We’ve all seen the memes about PlayStation’s obsession with re-releasing The Last of Us, so there’s no reason why it can’t give the same treatment to some of its other beloved IPs provided they still own the licences for them.

Compared to Xbox, PlayStation’s attitude to retro titles has been sorely lacking so it’s nice to see the company become more involved with preservation over the last few years.

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