While Microsoft is touting how they will want to support the previous three generations as well with the new Xbox (Xbox Series X, as well as the currently unannounced Xbox Series S…), Sony has only confirmed PlayStation 4 support at the moment.

On Twitter, we found that Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has filed a patent earlier this year. It’s Japanese, but you don’t need to know the language to understand the three diagrams.

Okay, you might need some explanation for this one above, but the next image has everything you need to know:

Here, you can notice a PlayStation 2, a PlayStation 3, and a box of matches a PlayStation, which doesn’t look like it at all. We’d see the games on an external display, and the games would be provided via the cloud. Let’s quote the patent:  A large number of game titles across PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and various generations of game consoles can be stored and used via the cloud gaming library. These games can be run on a virtual machine that mimics the operating system associated with each game console.” Oh, and the fourth thing in the bottom left corner says Internet games. Would that mean they would have online functionality…?

And this effectively describes what Sony’s PLAN can be. They are going for the lowest common denominator, which, in our case, would be the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, which, unlike the PlayStation 5 Standard Edition, lacks a Blu-ray drive, meaning you wouldn’t be able to play games off discs. Thus, the online solution remains, and that would be the PlayStation Now. The games would be streamed, but the service isn’t available everywhere, and the Internet speed isn’t the best in several parts of the world.

It’s not official yet, but it looks like Sony might be using this solution for backwards compatibility beyond the PlayStation 4. What a shame that you can’t download the games to run them locally. The PS1 and the PS2 could be emulated that way without any problems…

Source: PSU