The PlayStation 5 has entered the latter stage of its lifecycle, Sony announced back in February. The fourth anniversary of the console has been marked by impressive victories and surprising setbacks. 2024 felt like an inflection point for the PS5, with Sony unofficially turning the page on the PS4 and paving the way for the next era of its first-party blockbuster exclusives. It was another lowkey great year for what is increasingly becoming the default high-end gaming console.
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There were excellent updates to the PS5 home screen UI, a slew of great exclusive games from second- and third-party partners, and an entire update to the console in the form of the $700 PS5 Pro. PS VR2 became platform agnostic, a 30th Anniversary celebration unveiled nostalgic accessories for longtime fans, and the base tier of PS Plus continued to deliver plenty of premium freebies. The lack of a new big-budget first-party game and the abysmal failure of Concord sent up red flags, but not major hurdles to a platform that soared to 65.5 million units sold last month.
All of this as an executive shakeup saw Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan replaced by co-CEOs Herman Hulst and Hideaki Nishino, reporting up to Sony COO Hiroki Totoki. Highly respected long-time PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida, one of the last familiar faces in the top ranks of the console maker, also announced he was leaving in a year when PlayStation went very quiet, with just a few State of Play livestreams and no major summer showcase. The next phase of PlayStation is coming, and 2024 showed that even seeming “off years” can still deliver for players in spades.
The Hardware
After tons of reporting, rumors, and speculation, 2024 was the year Sony finally launched the PS5 Pro. Its hefty price tag promised no-compromises gaming, with upscaled 4K resolution at 60fps thanks to a more powerful GPU and new machine learning technology called PSSR. The results so far have been good to mixed, with some games looking more gorgeous than ever while certain third-party releases struggle to play nice with PSSR and studios race to amend their PS5 Pro updates in the face of unexpected visual downgrades.
This has put the device, at least early on, firmly into the “nice but unnecessary” category of upgrades. Denser visual detail at higher framerates and greater ray-tracing options bring the PS5 console experience into closer parity with mid-level PC gaming, but don’t quite offer the “oh shit!” moments that might make even longtime fans feel the need to run out and immediately pick one up. That’s especially the case when even the base PS5 continues to perform so well and feel perfectly adequate in the near-term.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
This could be another indication that the console arms race is slowing to a crawl, with future generations yielding even more granular improvements. But the PS5 Pro’s PSSR tech also provides a glimpse at where console manufacturers could leverage AI to try to make up ground. Sony recently announced a partnership with AMD called Project Amethyst to “support broad work and machine learning across a variety of devices” in an effort that would pay dividends for other companies as well. The company is also reportedly already working with AMD on the PS6.
For now, the PS5 still isn’t getting a price drop. In fact, it actually became more expensive this year in certain regions, including Japan. The DualSense controller also received a stealth price hike. A temporary Black Friday sale took the PS5 all-digital price down to $375, only $25 less than what it launched at in 2020. The PS5 got better in 2024, but not cheaper.
The Software
The PS5 interface received a notable refresh this year in the form of a new customizable welcome hub. The default module when you start up the console comes with new backgrounds and a bunch of tiles that can be swapped in with various widgets, from trophies and controller battery life to news about wishlisted games, console storage, and who’s online. It’s a seemingly small touch that goes a long way toward making the PS5 ecosystem easier to parse, navigate, and engage with, and it might just be the start of a bold new era for the system’s UI.
There were a few other updates to the firmware in 2024. Adaptive charging made the console more energy-efficient for newer PS5 models, including the Slim and Pro, and party share now lets you circulate session invites directly on social media and other messaging apps. There’s still no great way to directly share screenshots and gameplay footage on social media after Sony cut integration with X (formerly known as Twitter), though the PlayStation App is getting closer to being the remote second screen for the PS5 it deserves to be.
But the biggest software update of all this year didn’t come to the PS5 at all—it came to the PlayStation Portal. The not-quite-a-gaming-handheld peripheral can now play a growing list of games directly from the cloud rather than needing to stream them from a home console strictly as a remote play device. This change essentially doubles the value of the $200 accessory, and potentially serves as a bridge to a future in which a full-fledged Sony handheld reportedly in development can play new games natively as well.
The Networks and Services
This portion of our annual PlayStation report card usually focuses almost exclusively on the services portion of the equation, but 2024 showcased some significant lapses in network functionality. While it still pales in comparison to the infamous 2011 PSN outage, the services were down intermittently for almost a full day back in the fall. It was a reminder of how much of the platform relies on constant connectivity to deliver on its promise, from multiplayer-only games to always-online single-player campaigns. Any outage, no matter how brief, is also notable in the context of Sony charging $10 a month for the ability to play online.
PlayStation Stars, a smaller rewards initiative incorporated into the PS app rather than the console itself, nevertheless raised questions when it was offline for multiple weeks over the summer with no real explanation from Sony as to why the service had gone down. Coupled with issues with activity cards and various high-profile firmware bugs, the normally quite stable PS5 platform wobbled more than usual in 2024. PS Plus’ Netflix-like library of downloadable games was on much firmer footing, however.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
PS Plus Premium, the most expensive of the service’s three tiers at $160 per year, added a bunch more PS classics to help round out its back catalog. Subscribing fans finally got access to the Sly Cooper trilogy, the first two Legacy of Kain games, Dino Crisis, and a bunch of other old-school favorites. For the program’s price, though, there still really needs to be a better alternative for accessing the vast reservoir of PS3 exclusives. Insomniac’s WW2 alien shooter trilogy Resistance also arrived on Premium, but only via streaming.
And while the middle tier—PS Plus Extra—continues to be hit-or-miss with what great games are added or rotated out, the base PS Plus catalog continues to be full of bangers. 2024 saw the addition of A Plague Tale: Requiem, Nobody Saves the World, Immortals of Aveum, Tunic, Sifu, Borderlands 3, Streets of Rage 4, Little Nightmares II, and the Dead Space remake, just to name a few. At the same time, we’ve gotten fewer and fewer high-profile day-one PS Plus releases. Animal Well was a GOTY contender but Foamstars and Quidditch Champions were both duds. Still, the cumulative library competes with the best of what Extra has and offers a great way to catch up on many of the best games of recent years.
The Games
Sony’s impressive first-party studios mostly took a backseat in 2024 with two important exceptions: Astro Bot and Concord. The first, from Asobo Studio, married the whimsy and creativity Sony’s Japan Studio was once synonymous with to the high bar of quality and production values showcased by the company’s more recent big-budget blockbusters. Astro Bot was announced in May and won best game at The Game Awards 2024 just seven months later. It’s a top-tier action platformer that also shows how the DualSense controller’s haptic gimmicks can transform the feel of otherwise familiar gameplay. Coupled with Lego Horizon Adventures, Sony demonstrated a new family-friendly range outside of the grim, violent prestige games that have defined its brand in years prior.
Concord, meanwhile, was an Icarus moment for Sony’s first-party live service initiative. The hero shooter from Firewalk Studios had a development budget of over $200 million, sources told Kotaku earlier this year, which culminated in a fine but forgettable multiplayer experience which failed to attract players so spectacularly at launch that Sony yanked the plug less than two weeks later with full refunds and a complete server shutdown. The company closed the studio it had purchased only the year prior and promised to incorporate the learnings from the debacle into its ongoing strategy.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
How Sony, renowned since the middle of the PS4 generation for quality checks and proactive player feedback, failed to spot any warning signs and instead ploughed full speed ahead either speaks to the overall challenge, complexity, and random luck of making live-service hits or to serious blindspots within PlayStation Studios. 2024 also saw the shutdown of London studio and mobile game maker Neon Koi, as well as the cancellation of multiple unannounced projects and hundreds of cuts across various studios, including Bungie. It all comes as the larger game industry grapples with high costs and delayed development timelines in a release climate that’s more competitive than ever.
Yet where Concord crashed, Helldivers 2 soared. Arrowhead Game Studios’ squad-based, ragdoll-physics alien shooter is one of the bestselling games of the year, especially on PC. Despite controversies around the required PSN login on Steam, nerfs to fan-favorite builds and battle pass gear, and a mid-year slowdown in new content, the game has delivered a fascinating, evolving storyline like a sci-fi D&D campaign made up of millions of players, all while continuing to push out regular new updates. It was a game worth buying a PS5 for, and not because it relied on the typical Sony blockbuster’s mix of expensive cinematic narratives and lush production values.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
What might have seemed like an otherwise quiet year for the PS5 was bolstered by other console exclusives both big and small, like Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Rise of the Rōnin, Stellar Blade, Silent Hill 2, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. The mix of action adventure, open world, RPG, and survival horror went a long way to rounding out an otherwise sparser release calendar compared to the post-covid high-water mark set by 2023. Xbox’s multiplatform strategy also saw critically acclaimed hits like Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment arrive on PS5 alongside multiplayer juggernaut Sea of Thieves and the open-world survival sim Grounded. and the biggest 2024 game that wasn’t available on PS5, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, will still arrive their early next year.
The PS5 might be heading into the latter stage of its lifecycle, but it feels like the best years are still in front of it. Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsuhima 2, titled Ghost of Yotei, was revealed earlier this year for a 2025 release, and Naughty Dog finally teased its first new, non-Last of Us project in a long time. It’s called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and promises a bold new sci-fi direction for the premier PlayStation studio that may also see it return a bit to its action-adventure roots. Fans are also still waiting on reveals for Santa Monica’s new not-God of War project, and leaks suggest Bend Studio will offer Sony’s next risky experiment in live-service gaming. Plus a multiplayer Horizon Zero Dawn game could be arriving as early as next year, and Insomniac’s Wolverine has been dark for a while as well.
Sony recently promised at least one new single-player blockbuster every year. 2024 didn’t have one, and it still turned out to be a great year for the platform.
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