As of October 6th, 2025, Playstation has officially stopped producing new games or new hardware for the Playstation 4. It really seems like only yesterday, they had just come into the market, and that was a little over ten years ago. Was that a long enough lifespan? Well, yes and no, but it was a long enough life to have some very memorable games come out for it in the generation. From Spider-man's greatest game to Resident Evil's seventh mainline entry, the memories are seemingly endless. This is the console that holds Doom 4 and Doom Eternal and those two games alone hold hours upon hours of gameplay in them.
Now, I'm being sentimental, I know. I've already talked about my grievances with the lifespans of the Sega Saturn and its worthy successor, the Dreamcast. I'm no stranger to the death of great consoles. Playstation has had a long list of great consoles, despite my semi-joking mocking of the first console in the line. The Playstation 4 had some serious shoes to fill, given the awesome Playstation 3 and its capabilities. It succeeded.
The eighth generation was very unique in several, SEVERAL ways, and that's mostly due to the Xbox One. While Playstation was going about business as usual, wrangling up all of their games and all of their game console features in line, Xbox was... not doing that. Instead, for some reason, Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to sell you a box that did television and movie streaming, music, basically anything a PC would already be more than equipped to handle. Oh, but THEN they were going to get to the games, you know, eventually. People were pretty baffled.
That's not even CLOSE to the worst part, though. They were starting to rattle off features like, ALWAYS ONLINE, the massive privacy camera on the front of the Xbone was always on, once you loaded the game from the disc into the console, the two were married now and you could NOT share your game with other console users. This meant that they were effectively erasing the used games aisle in every single gaming store. People saw this for what it was. While they were angling it as a more personal touch and a way to be closer to the customer, it actually came off like they wanted to get more money out of you so you could only buy new games, while also keeping you online to keep up full access to their online store while they watch you constantly with their camera and get all of the marketable information out of you they could. This was an absolute travesty of a mess.
To say that Playstation 4 won the console wars for the eighth generation is underselling it. People went to Playstation straight from Xbox 360 and they started buying PS4 games, leaving Xbox in the metaphoric dust. This KILLED Xbox sales to the point where not even offering free digital games through their Xbox Live service could make them catch up. It helped them along for a little bit, but Playstation won, hands down.
This spelled the absolute death of Microsoft's Xbox console, and we have been seeing its deteriorating state ever since. They almost straight up cancelled the Xbox Series X and the tenth generation console is still in heavy question. The problem was that the eighth generation was the worst generation to lose, and the Xbox lost so substantially, that it hurt their sales even MORE with the PS5. All of those PS4 games the customers had, both digital and physical can very comfortably be transferred to the PS5 with no sweat involved. It's takes a little over an hour and you are ready to play your old games on the new console that has already wiped the floor with the Series X system.
To say that Playstation could convincingly put on the good guy mask in this situation is the reason that they won the war. The video where they show how you can share games on the Playstation 4 has to be one of the funniest things they could have thought of and it probably sold them a couple million extra consoles as a result. The Playstation 4 came out on top because it focused on GAMING. Losing focus on gaming has killed many a console (though, I am hesitant to count the Philips CDI among them) because people are here for the sharpest gaming edge they can find. It gave us that and in great quantities. So, here we say goodbye to another console generation with the Playstation 4. It was a true gaming console, despite the other features. The Blu-Ray player, the streaming apps, playing old DVD's, all of it was there if you wanted it, but I'm here for GTA V because I have the urgent need to kill digital people! What? You all do it!
