As the PS4 dies its second death what is the true legacy of Sony’s best console?

Major publishers are giving up support of the PlayStation 4, but what is it that made the console such a success and how much of it was due to luck rather than judgement.

They say every person dies two deaths, the first when they physically expire and the second the last time anyone says their name. Something very similar is true of video game consoles. The PlayStation 4 was discontinued in March 2024, but its second death will be when the last game is released for the system. Since that will inevitably be some unnoticed indie game or shovelware title, the more public end comes when triple-A publishers stop making games for it, and that time is upon us now.

This week saw Activision announce that Call Of Duty 2026 will not be released on PlayStation 4. If EA Sports FC 27 also skips the last gen format, then that’s where you can draw a line under Sony’s fourth home console.

In trying to talk about the PlayStation 4 legacy, the overwhelming urge is to discuss it in reference to the failings of the PlayStation 5. That’s flattery of a sort, because the implication is that the PlayStation 4 got everything right and Sony was wrong to deviate from its lessons. But it does tend to ignore what a state Sony got itself into with the PlayStation 3 and how afterwards they did the one thing almost no video game company ever does… it learnt from its mistakes.

Although the PlayStation 3 did outsell the Xbox 360 worldwide, it was only by a narrow margin, that wouldn’t have been afforded to it if Microsoft hadn’t fumbled the ball in the Xbox 360’s final years, obsessing over Kinect and mismanaging its first party studios. In all other respects the PlayStation 3 was an embarrassing failure, a clear result of Sony becoming overconfident following the unprecedented success of the PlayStation 1 and 2.

The PlayStation 3 was overdesigned, overpriced, and suffered from a dearth of desirable exclusives – and this was in an era when there was no question over the importance of killer apps and first party games. Of course, there were some good games, but the hardware was difficult to develop for, with most third party titles running poorly and the Xbox 360 having a considerably better online service.

But the PlayStation 4 fixed all that. It’s online services immediately brought it up to par with Xbox and Sony’s relationship with other publishers was successfully renewed, so that it immediately became the lead format for almost every last gen game. Microsoft gifted them the failure of the Xbox One reveal, but Sony took full advantage of their rival’s mistakes.

It’s easy to forget now, but Sony’s reputation for first party games was unexceptional prior to the PlayStation 4. Naughty Dog started to come into their own on the PlayStation 3, but the majority of Sony’s homemade exclusives were mediocre shooters like Killzone 2 and Resistance: Fall Of Man or similarly unremarkable, and quickly abandoned, franchises like InFamous and MotorStorm.

Few of the games were actively bad but the difference when compared to the PlayStation 4’s stable of exclusives is night and day. God Of War, The Last Of Us Part 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Ghost Of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, and The Last Guardian are amongst the most critically acclaimed titles of the modern era, let alone just the last generation. Even the standard of paid-for exclusives, like Bloodborne, Nioh, and Death Stranding were better than anything before or since.

There will be people who both love and hate all these games, in various combinations, but there are two main reasons why the PlayStation 4 was such a success, one of which was due to Sony’s hard work and one of which was little more than happenstance.

Sony deserve full credit for carefully studying the failures of the PlayStation 3 and making sure none of them happened again. Especially as, given their general attitude at the time, you would’ve bet on them doubling down on everything and pretending there wasn’t a problem. But they didn’t.

The other factor working in the PlayStation 4’s favour is that it reached the perfect point of convergence between the power of a console and the economics of making games that take full advantage of it. Every generation, the number of people needed to make a triple-A game greatly increases and that clearly can’t go on forever. Likewise, games taking more than five years to make, or requiring a budget of over $300 million, is not sustainable – but that was not the norm in the PlayStation 4 era.

Sony didn’t do anything to create that balance but they were able to take advantage of that unique moment in time, when video games could be both cutting edge and creatively innovative, and all without the necessity of being a sequel or licensed product.

Unfortunately, like the PlayStation 4 itself, that time is over. Games are too expensive and time-consuming to make in the same way or at the same cadence. Sony is doing nothing to address the problem – their answer seems to be just to shrug their shoulders and release less games overall – and neither is anyone else, with even Nintendo struggling to keep up a steady release schedule.

Even if the PlayStation 6 is released next year it’s likely that cross-gen PlayStation 5 games will continue to be released for many years to come, with an even bigger overlap than the PlayStation 4. So there may be no way to compare it, or any other consoles, with previous generations.

Whatever happens in the future though it’s hard not to see the PlayStation 4 as the pinnacle of PlayStation gaming. A console that got everything right and did so at the perfect time to take advantage of conditions in the games industry that are now seemingly impossible to replicate.

Maybe EA Sport FC 27 will still be released on PlayStation 4 – it is usually the last franchise to abandon an outgoing generation – but with Call Of Duty out of the picture the console’s story already seems complete and it’s hard to imagine Sony ever bettering it.

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