Sonyrecently stated that the PlayStation 5 is entering thelatter half of its life. That may seem surprising to players, given that a popular narrative around the console is still — four years into its life cycle — that it “has no games.”
That isn’t entirely true, because of course it isn’t. But the PS5 got such a slow start out of the gate that the idea of shelling out for a new console anytime soon isn’t going to be easy for consumers to stomach.
Itistrue that, by the standards of previous generations, the PS5’s life should be a little more than half over. ThePS2was the primary Sony console for six years, and thePS3for seven. ThePS4launched in 2013 and the PS5 came out seven years later, in the fall of 2020. But, 2020 wasn’t a normal year and the console’s life cycle should reflect that.
To start with the most vibes-y reason: it just doesn’t feel like it’s been four years since the PS5 came out, mostly because it still feels like 2020 just ended. The pandemic dilated time for many of us. With lockdowns and the accompanying days of staying in and avoiding friends, much of that time is a gray blur with one day barely distinguishable from the next. Add in the subsequent variants and the spikes in infections they brought in their wake, and those pandemic years had more in common with each other than anything on either side. It was one neverending year, not several discrete ones.
Vibes aside, COVID also had a material impact on this console’s rocky beginning, with supply chain issues making the PS5 extremely difficult to track down for about a year after launch. I was able to nab one within a few months, but it was slim pickings for many of the Sony faithful. That problem was alleviated somewhat by the fact that most of the console’s early games were cross-gen. The defining games of this generation so far — Spider-Man: Miles Morales, God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West, etc. — have, by and large, been available on PS4. There were exceptions from the beginning likeDemon’s Souls, which was a PS5-exclusive launch game. But the few exclusives, including Ratchet & Clank and Returnal, were the exceptions, not the rule.
That’s recently come to an end, with big Sony exclusivesSpider-Man 2,Final Fantasy 16, andFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirthskipping last-gen consoles. But we’ve been in a bit of a prolonged PS4 hangover. Though Sony’s Jim Ryan said “we believe in generations” in the lead-up to the PS5’s launch, the last generation has bled into this one more than one might expect.
This is exacerbated by some of Sony’s biggest developers releasing games at the end of the PS4’s life cycle. Naughty Dog launchedThe Last of Us Part 2a few months before the PS5 hit store shelves, and hasn’t yet completed an all-new game for PS5. Sucker Punch releasedGhost of Tsushimaa month after TLOU2, and hasn’t yet completed an all-new game for PS5. Kojima Productions putDeath Stranding out at the end of 2019… and hasn’t yet completed an all-new game for PS5. The exception is that theFinal Fantasy 7 Remaketeam at Square Enix similarly launched a PS4 exclusive in the waning days of the system and now, four years later, has something new to show.
Thinking back, it’s wild how much of a release bonanza that last year of the PS4’s life cycle was, and it may have messed with our expectations for the PS5. Most of the time, huge Sony exclusives aren’t launching every month but Dreams (February 2020), Nioh 2 (March 2020), Final Fantasy 7 Remake (April 2020), The Last of Us Part 2 (June 2020), and Ghost of Tsushima (July 2020) made that the norm for a little while.
PS5 hasn’t reached that point yet, and it would be wise for Sony to give the console a little extra time. COVID was a world-changing event. It doesn’t seem like too much to expect it to add a year or two to a video game generation.
