By Nelson Schneider - 10/18/26 at 04:20 PM CT
Yet more excellent information is coming to light in the aftermath of Sony’s announcement of the discontinuation of physical media in 2028 and the resultant backlash. It turns out that Sony’s insistence that PS5 owners re-buy their old favorite PS2 and PS3 games on the PlayStation Network due to the PS5’s inability to read any discs older than those printed for the PS4 was... bullsh!t.
Modders have forked the open source PlayStation 2 emulator and gotten it running on jailbroken PS5 consoles... and surprise, surprise, the emulator can play games directly off of PS2 discs inserted into the PS5’s optical drive. PlayStation 3 support is in the works, but the optical drive isn’t the cause behind the hold-up.
So, instead of giving long-term PlayStation supporters the all-in-one gaming box that will play their entire library of discs from 1994 through today, the company has intentionally implemented arbitrary cutoffs in order to re-sell older games as digital licenses that they fully control and can edit or revoke at any time – probably in order to resell yet another digital license at some point in the future, with additional user privileges like ad-supported streaming or AI upscaling. This is the kind of value-added service that should be a no-brainer to bundle into a console as a bonus for the fans who have supported Sony and PlayStation for Generations. But, alas, with the nickel-and-dime enshittification of everything, everything that was once a free bonus is now a premium add-on.
This news of Sony arbitrarily locking out backward compatibility pairs nicely with other news of modders successfully reverse-engineering the ENTIRE PlayStation Store and putting up a completely free version called Overdrive, accessible on jailbroken consoles. Sony, of course, sent a Cease and Desist letter, and Overdrive went away, but as a free-open source project, it already has a number of forks out there, allegedly offering upwards of 1,800 digital PS5 games for free... which is about what digital PS5 games are worth.
