While the end of physical PlayStation discs has taken up most of the headlines over the past few weeks, that news was also accompanied by the revelation that Sony is finally going ahead with its long-delayed plan to close the PS3 and Vita stores. While that's going to end official access to many PlayStation games, the developers behind the PS3 emulator RPCS3 have just passed a major milestone in the unofficial preservation of the console's library.
"75% of all PlayStation 3 games are now PLAYABLE on PC," the RPCS3 devs exclaim in a post on Twitter. "RPCS3 continues to be improved with new features, fixes, and optimisations, bringing it ever closer to preserving the entire PS3 library."
For the RPCS3 compatibility list, "playable" means that a game can be completed without major glitches or performance issues. 2,681 of the 3,559 games tracked by the RPCS3 devs are now marked as playable, and most of the rest can at least let you get in-game.
There's still a lot of work to do, however. While, yes, the vast majority of the total library is fully playable, a substantial number of the remaining 25% are among the best PS3 games of all time. Those titles include games like The Last of Us, God of War 3, Metal Gear Solid 4, and the whole Uncharted series. There are modern alternatives to play many of those games, of course, but if the mission is "preserving the entire PS3 library," those are some very notable gaps.
But the fact that the big PS3 exclusives are among the last to be made fully compatible on the emulator makes sense, since those are often the games that push the original hardware to its limits. The devs behind RPCS3 have already done incredible work in making sure a notoriously difficult-to-emulate console will have much of its library saved for the future, and I'm certain there'll be plenty more to follow.
