Now don't be getting your hopes up just yet as the patent in question doesn't explicitly state it's about PlayStation 5. At the moment, however, there's very little else that it could refer to other than its backwards compatibility.
Well, very little else that we know of, as it's possible that Sony are referring to something else. That being said, the patent filing lists the name of Mark Cerny, lead architect on PS4 and some other distinctly-Sony names, so you do the math.
If you've been following Sony's PlayStation iterations through the years, you probably know that backwards compatibility wasn't even a phrase in the days of PlayStation 2. For the most part, you just put in the disc and it worked, no Todd Howard pun intended.
Unfortunately, once Sony sold out their initial supplies of PlayStation 3 consoles, which were backwards compatible thanks to some traces of resemblance to PS2's architecture, everything changed. Except for the war. Yeah, that one was intended.
Come PlayStation 4, backwards compatibility went from a phrase to a highly requested feature and had there not been for some insurmountable hardware challenges in full implementation thereof, Sony would've been flogging it like there's no tomorrow.
It seems like Sony may be doing just that, as the patent speaks of methods to eliminate errors in synchronisation between newer and older devices. In such a scenario, PlayStation 5 would actively detect and adapt to the hardware demands of a given game, eliminating the current problems of mismatched communication between consoles.
Even though we're still in the realm of speculation, seeing as how the patent never mentions consoles by name, fans seem to be pretty excited over the possibility. Heck, we've even seen some Xbox One owners say they'd buy one if they address backwards compatibility.
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And to be honest, it's hard not to get excited over that, because the concept alone means you can play decades of games on a single device. Of course, they could also buy a PC but we're not getting into that now.
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