"99 percent" of PS4 games are playable with PS5 backwards compatibility, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan has confirmed following the news of the PS5 price and PS5 release date earlier this week.

Speaking to The Washington Post, Ryan said that thousands of PS4 games have been tested on PS5, and the overwhelming majority run fine with the console's backwards compatibility programme, with only 1% unplayable at present.

It's unclear what makes that minority of PS4 games incompatible with the PS5 hardware, but it does suggest that it'll be rare case for players to boot up one of their favourite classic on their next-gen system, only to find it doesn't work in the first place.

(Image credit: Sony)

The newly announced PlayStation Plus Collection, meanwhile, has essentially confirmed 18 titles that will run on PS5, including the likes of Bloodborne, Uncharted 4, Until Dawn, and many more.

Ryan's comments follow previous clarifications from Sony that PS5 backwards compatibility will be available for an "overwhelming majority of the 4,000+ PS4 games", revealed in a blog post earlier this year.

That post from Hideaki Nishino confirmed that "compatible titles will run at a boosted frequency on PS5 so that they can benefit from higher or more stable frame rates and potentially higher resolutions"

During his Road to PS5 lecture in March, PS5 lead architect Mark Cerny also explained why some titles might not support backwards compatibility, as he said "Running PS4 and PS4 titles at boosted frequencies has also added complexity."

"The boost is truly massive this time around and some game code can't handle it. Testing has to be done on a title-by-title basis. Results are excellent, though. We recently took a look at the top 100 PlayStation 4 titles as ranked by playtime, and we're expecting almost all of them to be playable at launch on PlayStation 5."

"Once backwards compatibility is in the console, it's in," Cerny continued. "It's not as if a cost-down will remove backwards compatibility like it did on PlayStation 3."

Read more (Image credit: Sony) You can play PS4 games on PS5 with an external hard drive

It's encouraging to see Sony commit to PS5 backwards compatibility for its next-gen system, because the company's approach to the feature has been inconsistent up until now. It started well with PlayStation 2, which remains a standout for its ability to play almost every original PlayStation game and even use original PlayStation accessories such as controllers and memory cards.

Then things got weird with PlayStation 3. The launch version of the console had full backwards compatibility support for both original PlayStation and PS2 games, but later versions quietly dropped their support for PS2 while continuing to play original PlayStation titles. Then PS4 came along and restored a sense of consistency, at the very least, by having no built-in backwards compatibility whatsoever.

Then it got weird again when Sony started porting certain PS2 games onto PS4 with improved resolutions and framerates, and bringing unmodified versions of other games from across PlayStation history to the PlayStation Now streaming service. With PS5 backwards compatibility clearly laid out now, Sony's showing that this generation will take a much more considered approach to embracing PlayStation history.

For more, check out more upcoming PS4 games for 2020 and beyond, or watch our video on everything you need to know about PS5 below.