When looking at the consoles side by side, there’s very little to choose between the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series hardware. The latter, however, does have one big advantage over their competitor: backward compatibility. That could all be about to change, however, if a recently filed patent is anything to go by.
The patent in question was filed by Sony towards the end of last year and was published online a little earlier this month. It details a process which seems to be designed to allow the system to award players with trophies while playing “emulated” games. Which games exactly would be emulated is not made clear, although some are now speculating that this may be Sony’s way of adding backward compatibility to the PlayStation 5.
If this is indeed the case, it would be a huge shot in the arm for the recently released console and would take away one of its competition’s most valuable USPs. Due to the limited number of titles currently available for the next gen consoles, backward compatibility has proven to be a huge asset for Microsoft’s consoles; effectively adding thousands of titles to their libraries even before the systems were available to purchase.
It is worth noting though that this is not the first time that Sony has filed a patent relating to the method and apparatus for awarding trophies. The Japanese company first did so in late 2016 and did so again a few years later. Even so, just the thought of being able to play their older PlayStation games on their new consoles should be an exciting one for PS5 owners, not to mention the thousands of people who are still trying to get their hands on the ever elusive machines.
Although many older games have been remade or remastered and more still are available digitally through the PlayStation Store, there remain tens of thousands of PlayStation games that can currently only be played on an older console. This isn’t something that Xbox Series owners need worry about though, with the machines already capable of playing the vast majority of the games released for any of their predecessors.
Sony isn’t the only one making moves at the moment either, with a flurry of Microsoft related news having popped up over the past few days. The biggest is undoubtedly the company’s controversial decision to rebrand Xbox Live, although the tech giant has also been linked with an acquisition of Discord as well. Having only just finished wrapping up a deal to purchase Bethesda’s parent company, ZeniMax, it seems like both Microsoft and Sony are doing all that they can to emerge victorious from the latest round of the console wars.
Source: World Intellectual Property Organization
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