A lot has changed over the last 3 years for PlayStation and gaming as a whole. From the competition buying out valued partners (and vice versa) to leadership changes to Factions still just being a couple of JPEGs, it’s been a pretty hectic time with huge new things happening all the time. We even had a pandemic for a bit there. Remember that? No, sorry, keep it repressed. Push it down. However, one thing has remained surprisingly the same ever since the launch of the PS5 in late 2020: how few PS Plus Essential games are only available for PS5 owners.
Since the PlayStation 5’s launch, only Destruction AllStars (remember that?), TOEM, and Hell Let Loose have made available solely for PS5 players, with every other offering also coming to PS4 subscribers. TOEM was the last PS5-only game up for grabs, and that came way over a year ago in September 2022. The current ratio is roughly 1 PS5-only game a year.
Of those three, only Destruction AllStars is first-party, and something of a forgotten live service game already. TOEM, meanwhile, could feasibly work on older tech as it’s a cute, twee photography game that barely makes your PS5’s fans even whir. Hell Let Loose is probably the most demanding of all three games, if only for its 100-player battles.
It’s obviously daft to criticise Sony for the lack of PS5-only games, as it’s giving every subscriber value regardless of which generation they’re playing on. It’s more just interesting that there isn’t a much bigger gap, both in terms of Plus games and generally.
The eighth generation still hasn’t truly been left behind and will probably stick around for at least the next couple of years, at least in terms of multi-generational games being announced. Console shortages, booming costs, and that aforementioned pandemic have all made actually making, buying and selling games more daunting than ever, so publishers have seemingly sought to limit risk by ensuring the prospective audience is as big as it can be.
Still, it isn’t hard to feel like the ninth generation is truly yet to begin when you see surprising release trends like this. The separation is starting to show, with recent and upcoming games like Mortal Kombat 1, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Alan Wake 2 all leaving last gen behind, but there are still massive games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, EA FC, and Call of Duty that seem reluctant to let go. Take a look at the upcoming video game release schedule and there’s still a wide array of PS4 games on the horizon, big and small.
2024 will probably see more PS5-only games making their way to the service, with the PS5 entering its fourth year on the market (roughly the halfway point of its life) and its production issues long a thing of the past. It will be interesting to see just how essential Sony deems keeping every generation player happy going forward, and at what point the PS4 stops getting supported with Plus releases just like the PS3 did.
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