On Friday, Sony announced that an "overwhelming majority" of the 4,000+ PS4 games on the market right now will be available on the PS5 when it launches. Conversely, it was revealed that there will be some games that won't be playable on the PS5, specifically mentioning 10 titles. One developer, however, is giving us hope that PS4 games that aren't currently backwards compatible with PS5 could receive patches later on.
Backwards compatibility has been a major concern for gamers for as long as disks have existed. The ability to bring your old games to a new console is convenient both economically and in terms of clutter. Sony and Microsoft, therefore, have been keen to ensure that old games will work on their next-gen hardware.
The developer behind DWVR, one of the 10 incompatible PS5 games mentioned, has said in a series of Reddit posts that they're working on a remedy. As it stands, DWVR does not launch on the PS5. When asked what changes need to be made to make the game playable on the next-gen hardware, the game's developer said that they couldn't go into much detail, but that "the game just doesn't launch on PS5 for some odd reason."
They said this issue was especially strange considering that Unreal Engine was used for DWVR, a popular engine for PS5 games. Sony has stated that most games coming to the new console will also be getting a boost in performance. Ghost of Tsushima was used as an example of this, where the game can run at 60fps on the PS5.
If this developer can figure out the problem and create a patch, it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that other developers could similarly solve backwards compatibility issues with their games. Of course, this completely depends on the studios' list of priorities; some might be completely fine leaving their products on the PS4 alone. Either way, the PS5 launches on November 12 – in exactly one month.