PS3 games appear with prices on the PS5 store but they can’t be bought

The PS5 store now shows prices for PS3 games, which could be a sign of impending backwards compatibility for some titles.

PS3 games on the PS5 store usually redirect players to the PlayStation Now service, allowing players to stream older generation titles to their PlayStation using cloud gaming. However, now some of those entries show prices for purchasing the game. As spotted by VGC, this is true of the PS3 game Dead Or Alive 5, which has a price tag of £7.99.

While users cannot purchase the games with listed prices, it is worth noting that Dead Or Alive 5 is not available on the PlayStation Now service in Europe and appears to have been added for another purpose. A few other titles have been spotted as well.

Uhhh. Not to panic anyone, but a PS3 game shouldn’t have a price when viewed on a PS5.

Unless… pic.twitter.com/5CTACWGh7s

— Jordan Middler (@JordanMiddler) January 16, 2022

The ability to purchase legacy games appeared shortly after a patent was filed by PS5 system architect Mark Cerny, titled “backwards compatibility through the use of spoof clock and fine grain frequency control”. This patent suggests that Sony may be working on a solution that would allow backwards compatibility on the latest system.

It was also recently suggested that PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now could become combined. The new service would intend to be a competitor to Xbox’s Game Pass system. The Xbox itself already has an extensive list of backwards compatible titles.

In other news, God Of War developers responsible for the PC port have explained their decision to put DLSS into the game. “We wanted to address hitting a wide space of machines, so the image scalars basically allow a lot of scalability for the player,” said Steve Tolin of Jetpack Interactive. “Once we put in our own temporal image scaler, then it was okay, now, let’s support the DLSS and the AMD scaler, to basically give players the vast variety of options, to be able to tune it to get that experience that they need.”