The CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Jim Ryan, has confirmed that the PlayStation 5 will not be backward compatible with PS3, PS2 nor PS1 games.

While that may be obvious to some, especially given PlayStation's backward compatibility strategy in the past, others could still find it irksome.

"We have been building devices with a focus on PS5-specific engineering. Among them, PS4 already has 100 million players, so I thought that I would like to play PS4 titles on PS5 as well, so I introduced PS4 compatibility," he told Famitsu.

"While achieving that, we focused on incorporating high-speed SSDs and the new controller "DualSense" in parallel. So, unfortunately, compatibility with [PS1, PS2 and PS3 games] has not been achieved."

This comes on the back of Ryan's assurance that 99 per cent of PS4 games should work with PS5 eventually - starting with the 18 scheduled for launch date as part of the PlayStation Plus Collection.

Naturally, backward compatibility is a major benefit for Xbox Series X / S, with all games that run on an Xbox One (including supported Xbox 360 and original Xbox games) playable on the next-gen consoles from launch. Whether that will be a main factor in purchasing decisions is yet to be seen - it certainly hasn't hampered PS5 pre-orders, with stock having now sold out in many places.