The PS5 launched in November 2020 without a single slot for your PS2 collection. Sony's official answer was PS Plus Classics, a subscription library of emulated PS2 titles, while the actual discs sitting on your shelf gathered dust. Now, per GamesRadar, a jailbreak has PS2 discs running on the console — which is a polite way of saying the hardware was never the problem.
The standard line from platform holders is that emulation is difficult, licensing is messy, and nobody really wants to dig out a 20-year-old copy of Tekken 5. The licensing half of that is genuinely true: re-releasing a game means renegotiating music, voice work and regional rights. But a jailbroken machine reading the disc you already own sidesteps every one of those conversations. No storefront, no publisher, no permission slip.
That's the uncomfortable part. Disc-based backwards compatibility isn't a technical wall, it's a policy choice. Sony has spent two generations selling PS2 games back to you through its own storefront, and a universal disc drive competes directly with that business. Microsoft took the other road, shipping Xbox 360 and original Xbox support on Xbox One partly through disc emulation. Sony looked at the same problem and picked the checkout page.
None of this is an argument to go jailbreaking your own console. It voids warranties, risks account bans, and its legality shifts depending on where you live. But it does mean the "we can't" was always closer to "we won't."
All it took, as GamesRadar put it, was "six years and a massive jailbreak."