The PS4 generation isn’t over quite yet–but it’s finally getting close.
Notes on an extended cycle of cross-gen support and whether most gamers even want the graphics that only a next-gen console can produce.
In 2016, Activision made what seemed like a pretty sensible announcement. That year’s Call of Duty, a futuristic off-shoot called Infinite Warfare, would only be released for PC and current-gen consoles. That meant the so-called Gen 8 consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 were getting left behind.
The Gen 8 consoles had been released back in 2013, and there had already been three annual Call of Duty games released since then that had versions made for both the PS3-era devices and the PS4 ones.
By 2015, the Gen 7 version of Call of Duty didn’t even include the next-gen-only campaign mode.
For Activision's top franchise, the period of overlapping console generations had run for three years and was drawing to a close. About a year later, it would end for other big annual series, too.
If that seems different from what’s been happening this console generation for the last half-decade, well, it is.
Call of Duty had three years of overlapping generational support last time. For this console transition, it’s had more. Last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was the fifth consecutive annual Call of Duty game released on current gen consoles (Gen 9: PS5, Xbox Series) and the prior gen.
Other annual series have also extended their prior-gen support longer this time beyond what they did previously.
EA’s Madden NFL games were released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 as late as 2016, offering four straight versions that supported the old-gen consoles and the new ones. Madden dropped old-gen support in 2017. This time around, Madden games have supported PS4 and Xbox One for five annual editions since the launch of the PS5 and Xbox Series—with no word yet about whether they’ll go to a sixth with their 2025 release.
Take Two’s WWE 2K series offered prior-gen gamers three years of overlapping support during the previous console transition before dropping old-gen support in 2017. This week’s announcement of WWE 2K 25 included plans for a prior-gen PS4/Xbox One version, extending the series’ cross-gen support this time to four years.
Sony’s MLB The Show included PS3 versions for three releases after the launch of the PS4, before dropping support in 2017. Sony went longer this gen and has released four PS4-level editions of MLB The Show since the launch of the PS5. Notably, the final one came out last year. This week, Sony said that this March’s MLB The Show 25 would finally ditch the prior generation and only be released for PS5 and Xbox Series (plus PC and Switch).
It’s been a slower, more extended console transition, as many of the industry’s biggest companies have been loath to abandon the previous generation.
It makes sense, to an extent. There were 10s of millions of owners of Gen 8 consoles and not all of them have upgraded to newer units.
Don’t forget the last gen
Last spring, Sony president Hiroki Totoki said that there were 118 million monthly active users across PlayStation platforms and that “about half of the people are playing on PS4.”
This was surprising, if only because of how little older-gen consoles are discussed by game companies and games media once new units launch. People playing PS4 in 2023 and 2024? Sure! It happened a lot. Just didn’t get a lot of press.
The PS5 had sold 59 million units by spring 2024, which was not a small number. But Sony still had an equally massive amount of players—around 50 million—happily gaming on the device that preceded it. It certainly made sense that, in 2024, Sony would still sell a baseball video game to them that they could play.
(Prompted by those Sony stats, last year I collected replies from around 300 people who told me why they had held off on getting a new-gen console. The most common answer: no must-have games to justify the price.)
If anything, it’s notable that in 2025, Sony is finally showing a clear desire to cease PS4 support. Its first party games have been moving that way. Insomniac’s Spider-Man franchise ditched PS4 for the Spider-Man 2 game in 2023. The ill-fated Concord last year was PS5-only.
And Sony is now, right on schedule, moving its subscription plan’s benefits away from the prior generation.
This week Sony also said it plans to stop regularly offering monthly PS4 games to PlayStation Plus subscribers, starting in January 2026. That means the PS4 benefit for PS Plus will have lasted just over 60 months since the launch of PS5. That’s almost exactly as long as the PS3 benefit for PS Plus lasted into the PS4 era.
Sony’s messaging about the PS Plus change this week noted that “many of our players are currently playing on PS5 and have shifted toward redeeming and accessing PS5 titles.”
The curious case of NBA 2K
It’s unclear how successful the extension of support for the prior generation of consoles has been, either for players or game-makers.
No big game publisher breaks down the sales for its cross-gen games by console generation, so it’s hard to know how popular, say, the PS4 version of MLB The Show 24 was compared to the PS5 edition.
But there is one game series, NBA 2K, where the bet on longer old-gen support does not seem to have played out as planned. That situation illustrates what a weird console transition this has been.
In August of last year, NBA 2K parent company Take Two reported lower-than-expected revenues from its cross-gen NBA 2K series, and executives wound up fielding a question from a financial analyst who suggested that Gen 8 consoles (PS4, Xbox One) were proving overly “sticky” and that gamers were not buying newer, more expensive versions of the game.
“No, I don't think what consumers are saying is they are good with Gen 8 and don't care about Gen 9,” Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick said in response.
“We saw the exact contrary with regard to NBA 2K, where Gen 8 actually was not a high performer and performed worse than we expected.”
The cross-gen bet hadn’t paid off, in other words.
Three months later, Take Two president Karl Slatoff fielded an analyst question about seemingly flat sales for September’s NBA 2K25 (released for Gen 8 and Gen 9) compared to the prior year’s editions.
Again, the answer showed that Gen 8 had fallen off, problematically so.
“We still are dealing with the dynamic of: the Gen 9 console business is certainly growing, but…not at the same rate as the Gen 8 is declining,” Slatoff said.
He added: “We obviously expect that that's going to reverse at one point in the future, as Gen 9 continues to take a foothold and people have more and more reasons to move from Gen 8 to Gen 9.”
(Note: One of the biggest motivators for Gen 8 gamers to finally buy a Gen 9 console is slated to be released by Slatoff’s company later this year. And another note regarding any muted uptake for Gen 9: Consoles just haven’t dropped their prices this generation. By now, they normally would have.)
So, was all this extended support for Xbox One and PS4 editions of games this far into the current console generation a mistake?
In the U.S., at least, support for games on Gen 8 consoles last year does not appear to have been lucrative. “It was not unusual for 2024 new releases with PS4 and/or XBO versions to see less than 10% of overall sales volume of that title coming from those versions, in some cases significantly less,” Mat Piscatella, a Circana analyst who tracks the U.S. gaming market, told me.
Who needs new hardware?
For some gamers, the extended cross-gen support this time around has been a frustrating drag on the technical progress they expect from the medium. Whenever a new PS5 game also had to have a PS4 version, they reasoned, it couldn’t have used the PS5’s capabilities to the fullest.
That may be, but the economics of modern gaming are also showing that games that push console hardware aren’t necessarily worth the cost of development.
The question of whether gamers are moving on to the next hardware these days can easily morph into questions about whether game developers should or, more fundamentally, even whether a new console generation is needed.
“Every 7 or 8 years the platforms spend billions in R&D,” Matthew Ball, an entrepreneur and occasional analyst who just wrote a provocative State of Video Gaming in 2025 report, told me. “Then they spend billions in content development to re-platform otherwise happy customers while giving publishers an opportunity to elevate their game. And it is not leading to more players. It's not selling more units and it's not selling more consoles, and it is becoming brutally expensive.”
Ball doesn’t advocate for an end to new consoles, but we had a blunt discussion about whether it is wise for game makers to still pursue the highest-end graphics people associate with a next-gen upgrade, when gamers are sending so many signals that they don’t prioritize them.
Games that don’t require cutting edge hardware—such as Fortnite, Roblox and Grand Theft Auto V—still top console activity charts, Ball noted.
Nintendo just outshined Sony and Microsoft for the past eight years with a console that launched with less horsepower than the PS4 and Xbox One.
Over on Roblox, one of the planet’s most popular gaming platforms, games with advanced graphics are possible and some even do fairly well, but the most popular experiences are still visually primitive and don’t exactly tax advanced gaming hardware. Speaking of supporting older hardware, Roblox is compatible back to 2013’s iPhone 5S, though many experiences reportedly don’t run very well on devices older than 2016’s iPhone 7.
The bottom line: Older devices can still run the games people most want to play.
So, goodbye PS4 (and Xbox One). But, hey Sony and Microsoft, maybe take your time with PS6 and the next Xbox.
Item 2: In brief…
🎮 Midnight Society, the 55-person video game studio that was making the extraction shooter Deadrop, is shutting down, per a company announcement.
The studio was co-founded by streamer Herschel “Guy” Beahm (aka Dr. Disrespect), who was then dropped by the team last year following allegations of misconduct around Beahm.
Coincidentally, Beahm announced yesterday that he will be able to monetize videos he makes for YouTube again. He had been locked out from profiting from the platform following those allegations, which involved messages with a minor, though he has stressed they did not involve anything illegal.
🚫 Warner Bros. is shutting down online support, ceasing content development and delisting its free-to-play Smash Bros.-style fighting game MultiVersus, as of May 30.
The game will still be playable locally after that date.
This extended WB’s live service misfortunes, following the flop of last year’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. That game, though it remains on sale, saw its live-service support end earlier this month.
🤔 BioWare is down to under 100 employees, from 200 two year ago, as EA shrinks the studio post-Dragon Age, Bloomberg reports.
💡 The Video Game History Foundation has launched an online library of digital materials including 1500 out-of-print video game magazines, searchable maps of the first 12 E3 shows and a collection of work papers from Mark Flitman, a producer for Konami, Acclaim, Midway and Mindscape in the 1990s and 2000s.
Item 3: The week ahead
Tuesday, February 4
Kingdom Come Deliverance II (PC, PS5, Xbox Series) is released.
Nintendo reports quarterly earnings (and will surely be quizzed by investors about Switch 2).
Capcom will host an online showcase at 5pm ET to provide the latest on Onimusha, Monster Hunter and more.
Wednesday, February 5
While Waiting (PC, Switch), a game about doing things while waiting, is released.
Thursday, February 6
Take Two reports quarterly earnings (and will surely be quizzed by investors about GTA VI).
Side-scrolling road trip game Keep Driving (PC) is released.
Friday, February 7
A Game About Digging A Hole (PC) is released. Yes, that’s the title. Yes, that’s what it is about.
Great read! I don't expect to be in the majority on this, but I've been re-assessing a lot of things in my life over the last decade - my participation in consumerism, the ecological footprint of tech industries at large, and the preservation of games. I also think often about the recent study that found that 60% of gamers are playing games that released 6 years ago or longer.
The last decade of gaming saw the release and push of countless big titles with ongoing content schedules and online communities that have proved to have impressive longevity. A lot of people found their communities and the games that speak to them during this time period, and while there are always new and exciting things to try out, if your favourite game still has new seasonal content and people are still playing it, why ditch it?
The industry pushed hard for these games as a service titles over the last decade, and while it's a trend full of costly cautionary tales, there are also many titles still stand as a testament to the success of the idea when it hits and the community stands by to support it. People are still enjoying a lot of these games (I say this as someone who still plays Destiny 2 and primarily does so on a PS4), so it feels like a statistical change the industry should have expected, that these longer-term experiences may result in fewer people looking to buy new titles month after month, and this isn't even touching the economic factors that see most working class people having less disposable income and less downtime due to working longer hours/multiple jobs.
The ongoing popularity of previous-gen hardware and titles that aren't brand-new is something that to me illustrates something I'd love to see the games industry embrace more - legacy. Enduring enthusiasm for older games, access and celebration of these titles, and the hard work that goes into making them. Orgs like the Video Game History Foundation Library do incredible work, and I really hope we see more archival work done to preserve media and keep it in people's hands. Innately, I think that will mean the broader gaming space moving to more community-run efforts to keep things preserved and accessible, and I hope we see publishers and rights holders become more willing to hand off their IP once they're done supporting it, so those games can live on in the hands of the people who love them, lest a unique era of the medium become lost media that is much trickier to preserve than simple ROMs of offline classics.
Stephen, thank you! Great article and I definitely learned more than I expected to. Also, to @AndroidisaLoser's point, I definitely think having the option of multiple systems, each with several hundred games' worth of backlog is a "thing" that game companies haven't really come to grips with, in ADDITION to 2 points made in your article, Stephen (and in many others as well):
1) Cross gen support has gone on much longer between last gen and this gen then it did previously, really evers.
2) Graphical fidelity is arguably at it's least different now between the generations then it has ever been. Nintendo to Genesis/Super Nintendo? My eyes wept. N64 to PS2? Mother of God, angels descending from on high! PS4 to PS5? Which game is it, what are the console settings and, I mean, I guess Spiderman swings a little smoother and the uniform looks a little crisper...