PS5 Jailbreak Lets You Play PS2 and PS3 Discs, Raising Backwards Compatibility Questions

Ever wondered why your PS5 can't just play that stack of old PS2 discs gathering dust? A recent jailbreak has proven it absolutely can—you just need to bypass Sony's permission first.

The PS5 jailbreak scene has exploded in the past few weeks, and the most exciting development for retro fans is the arrival of robust emulators. The standout is PS5SX2, a port of the popular PC emulator PCSX2, which lets you play PS2 games on your PS5. The kicker? You can directly insert your old PS2 discs into the console's disc drive and the emulator will read them. Testing from MVG shows there might be some stutters when running games straight off the disc, but installing the game to your hard drive offers a smoother experience.

There's also RPCS3-5, a port of RPCS3 that enables PS3 games to run on PS5 using original discs. Don't expect miracles—PS3 emulation is a struggle even on high-end PCs—but the fact that it works at all on the modern platform is a minor miracle. And yes, PS1 emulators are now available for jailbroken PS5s too. However, the PS5's disc drive only reads DVDs and Blu-rays, so there's no CD laser for PS1 discs. That also means a handful of CD-based PS2 games aren't supported. But there's a workaround: grab one of the plentiful and inexpensive USB disc drives online, plug it into your PS5, and boom—PS1 support added.

This isn't the first time PS5 jailbreaks have allowed PS2 games to be played, but earlier solutions required each game to be packaged together using a hacked version of Sony's official emulator. You didn't have the freedom to simply insert a PS2 disc and play it like a normal backwards compatible game. Now, that freedom exists.

So the obvious question: why didn't Sony let us play PS2 games on PS5 in the first place? The disc drive natively supports these DVDs, and the company built its own PS2 emulator to power various games on the PlayStation Store. Have we really been locked out of this feature for all these years purely because Sony would rather have us permanently subscribed to PS Plus and its library of old games? It's tough to come up with a read on this that's not extremely cynical, but Sony's made it pretty easy to assume the worst this generation.

With the end of PlayStation discs looming, analysts suggest Sony's real aim is to gather full control of an all-digital marketplace for games. Support for PS1, PS2, and PS3 discs—all of which are parts of used markets that Sony sees no profits from—isn't especially compelling for the people making the publisher's business calls. Still, for those of us who love retro games, this jailbreak is a welcome reminder of what could have been.

What do you think? Should Sony officially support PS2 backwards compatibility on PS5? Let us know in the comments!