Noted hardware leaker Moore’s Law Is Dead has claimed in an episode of the Broken Silicon Podcast with Colin Moriarty that the PS6 will be backwards compatible with PS5 & PS4 games.
A few hours into the podcast, the leaker talks about the PS6, and makes it clear that, according to a document that he’s seen, Sony’s next-generation system will indeed play PS5 and PS4 games. Here’s what he had to say:
The PS6 handheld is a PS6, and what I want to leak today, because this document is years old, and it directly shows Canis [PS6 codename] backwards compatibility support. Another part of this doc it literally says ‘back [backward] compat [compatbility] PS4, PS5.’ Just says it right there. I just wanna leak this today: The PS6, yes, it has backwards compatibility to 4 [PS4] and 5 [PS5], and they explicitly say it all over the place. Even the handheld, they explicitly say it runs PS6, PS5, and PS4 games.
Earlier this week it was reported by another leaker, Kepler_L2, that the PS6 is unlikely to receive a ‘lite’ model as it would be a ‘nightmare’ for developers. That same insider stated that they believe Sony could flog the PS6 for $699.99 although in terms of specifications, this would likely not include a disc drive and would only offer a 1TB SSD. As Moore’s Law Is Dead mentioned above, Sony’s new hardware is heavily rumoured to be joined by a handheld companion known as Canis, which will reportedly feature a GPU more powerful than the Xbox Series S.
Sony has not yet officially announced the PS6, but it is heavily rumoured that the new system will launch in late 2027 despite recent murmurs that the console could be delayed to 2028 or beyond.
[Source – Broken Silicon Podcast via Insider Gaming]