The PS4 generation isn’t over quite yet — but it’s finally getting close

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 than they did previously.

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 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. (Prompted by those 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.)

It certainly made sense that, in 2024, Sony would still sell a baseball video game to them that they could play.

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 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.

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.