PlayStation Blog

Aside from freeing up space used by my growing collection of older consoles, I'm not convinced full backwards compatibility for PS3 and earlier games should be a hard requirement for PS5. However, all of my older games are physical purchases and I've only recently been blessed with a fast enough home connection to make downloading games practical.

If there is enough demand, I hope that it will be possible to add PS5 support for emulating older downloadable games purchased from the PlayStation Store.

I'm personally more inclined to pay (again) for a quality remastered version on a next gen console. I've enjoyed replaying some of the PS4 remastered games with higher definition graphics (Last of Us, God of War 3, CoD: Modern Warfare, Uncharted Collection, ...) and I still aim for Platinum trophies for my favourites.

Sony has also said "We believe that the overwhelming majority of the 4,000+ PS4 titles will be playable on PS5" (https://blog.us.playstation.com/2020/03/18/unveiling-new-details-of-playstation-5-hardware-technical-specs/) which hopefully covers most of the games I've bought in the last 6 or so years.

Indeed. It's not quite as cheap as steam (75% off), but if you keep your subscription up you'll get a bunch of free games that puts the subscription into "great deal" territory.

I was on the fence about it for a long time, but after the second time my console died and lost all my game saves, I wanted the cloud save feature. It ends up that since I bought the PS Plus subscription, I actually haven't bought any games. I'm a infrequent gamer - I play games, but not every day. My back catalog of good games is pretty big, so there's a lot of good stuff that comes through the freebie channel.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/06/10/playstation-plus-e3-2013-sale-free-machinarium-uncharted-3-xcom-more/. If you scroll down you see the discounts on purchases.

This month they gave out Uncharted 3, XCom, LBP Karting (I bought it when it was $10 for PS+ subscribers), and Deus Ex Human Revolution. Previously they've had Ratchet and Clank, Spec Ops: The Line, Sleeping Dogs, and a bunch of other big studio titles. If you bought just the titles for this month you'd spend at least $50, even at the cheapest retailers online.

You're right that the US was holding out while other regions got price increeases. But this is actually the 2nd US price increase in 12 months. This is the increase from August: https://blog.playstation.com/2025/08/20/playstation-5-price-changes-in-the-u-s/

Nintendo much be in an especially hard place. They just released their new generation of consoles, but from what I hear holiday sales did "fine". Not great, fine. So they definitely don't want to stunt their entire generation by raisig their prices in the first year while they are already worried about hardware sales. Maybe that's a part of why they recently reported the price differences between physical and digital games.

> whatever Sony's version of Gamepass is called

Just mentioning that it's PS Plus, and the game was made available on their Extra & Premium tiers at launch [0], which is nice, as they typically release all the games on the same day in the middle of the month.

[0] https://blog.playstation.com/2025/04/09/playstation-plus-game-catalog-for-april-hogwarts-legacy-blue-prince-the-second-episode-of-lost-records-bloom-rage-and-more/

P.S. "Lost Records: Bloom & Rage", the second half of which is due to come out in a couple of days is very different, but highly recommended too, especially in its emotional vibes and how well they integrated the VHS camera into the gameplay.

Is there any reason in particular you think this? Sony only removed the feature, citing "security concerns" mere months after George Hotz released the exploit. They would later go on to sue him. https://blog.playstation.com/archive/2010/03/29/ps3-firmware-3-21-coming-april-1st/

On the other hand, the Ps3 clusters were around since basically the console's launch. Additionally, the console had been selling at a profit, at least in the US, by 2009, before they removed the other os feature.

All this happened 16 years ago. If you're curious about stuff that has happened so recently, you can research it online.

With the planned death of physical media for games, it will soon become impossible to do so. Like, Sony literally plans to stop making discs starting in 2028, and all games you buy will have to be digital only. GTA 6 is just giving a code in a box. It's really the end of times for physical media in a few years, maybe something can change if consumers push back but they likely will not if we are being realistic.

https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-production-ending-in-january-2028-for-new-games-releasing-on-playstation-consoles/