admin If you asked Sony executives about PlayStation 2025, they’d probably tell you it was great. According to the company, the PS5 is already his “most successful” console generation after just five years. Thanks to all the money Sony has made from microtransactions and subscription services like PlayStation Plus, the system that the Internet claims to have “no games” eclipses its predecessors (as long as you don’t adjust for inflation), and probably has a few more years left in it. But does Sony actually have anything to show for it in year five?
Although it beats previous PlayStations in terms of revenue and the Hardware sales have been hugethe lifespan of the PlayStation 5 is also determined by live service flops, studio closuresAnd time-consuming remasters. Throughout the PS5 era, Sony has been guzzling cash but not offering the kind of big (and small) exclusives defined by recognizable characters, experiences, and stories that were once synonymous with the brand.
In 2024, the PS5 seemed like a cultural black hole despite its success. Has 2025 put things back on track? Or was it just another year of Sony’s misguided pivots away from what made PlayStation more than just the box on which you play the games that don’t work well on Switch?
The hardware
While the PlayStation 5 is still a huge success for Sony, like most other video game hardware, so was hit by a price increase. This followed that of the Trump administration new rates (although the price of the device was grew up in other areas outside America), which also caused Xbox to raise its prices and seemingly affected the Switch 2’s debut MSRP in June. Now the system will run you an extra $50 no matter which SKU you buy. The standard edition costs $549.99, while the digital edition without a disc drive now costs the same as the version with a disc drive in 2020, at $499.99. The PlayStation 5 Pro, meanwhile, has been increased to a whopping $749.99, which is a hefty asking price for something that didn’t make much of an impression.
Historically, console prices should drop as a generation progresses. Sony has already said it’s the PS5 entering the “later stages of his life,‘and the PS6 does supposedly on the way. But even as the PS5 enters its final years, it’s more expensive than ever. The only time you probably would have paid more for the thing was when it was scarce and scalpers were reselling it. (A cheaper model was also available released in Japan earlier this yearbut it is region specific.)
The PS5 may have gone up in price, but one of the peripherals broke and stayed there. The price tag of the PlayStation VR2 is $550 dropped to $400 in February in response to messages that Sony had production stopped the headset as it struggled to meet its original projections. This makes it unsurprising that Sony itself hasn’t done much to support the PSVR2 in 2025. A few notable third-party projects such as Lumines are created, Hitman world of murderAnd Alien villain incursion kept the VR sick fed, but Sony didn’t do much with it in 2025.
Also on the hardware side, Sony is finally making the PlayStation portal what it should always have been. The streaming handheld was previously a Remote Play machine that allowed you to stream your PS5 to it, but now the device can stream games directly from the cloud, instead of sending them from another system.
The software
Overall, booting a PS5 in 2025 hasn’t changed much. Yes, Sony has brought some back dynamic themes having previously made it a temporary flourish, but after that, scroll through the 2025 system software patch notes shows off a bunch of minor quality of life changes, a few accessibility updates like the addition of an audio focus option to help soft sounds come through more clearly on the headphones, and more customization options for the main menu UI. There’s a lot for audiophiles to chew on, but overall the PS5 user experience is quite good. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.
The services
The price of the PS5 wasn’t the only price Sony increased this year. The cost of PlayStation Plus, the subscription service that lets users play online, add monthly free games to their collection, and stream a huge library of older titles at higher tiers, was also walked in several countries in Apriland so is Sony open to do it again. This wasn’t the first time Sony did this in the PS5 eraor. It feels like as more people put time into free-to-play games, Sony is looking for different ways to squeeze some juice out of them through subscriptions and microtransactions.
The games
But none of the above matters if the games aren’t there. The PlayStation 5 has so completely embedded itself in the public consciousness as the de facto video game console on your TV that Xbox won’t tell us its sales figures anymore. As a result of its market dominance, the success of any PS5 game can be considered a PS5 victory. Huge breakthrough games like Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33 they don’t even have to be Sony games for the PS5 maker to benefit from this. Fortnite can continue to fall asleep billions in revenue and if those microtransactions happen through the PlayStation Store, Sony gets a cut. So what does Sony actually do with the hypothetical freedom you get from being top dog? Not much in 2025.
The grim trend of recent years continued, with Sony studios repeatedly hit by layoffs in 2025 after live service projects failed to get off the ground. And yet PlayStation toppers continue to do so emphasize that this is the way forward for the company once defined by more than a desperate need to hook someone into dailies and microtransactions. Marathon was even postponed Lot 2 strugglessuch were the main PlayStation pillars this year Death stranding 2which will eventually move to other platforms, and Spirit of Yoteiwhat despite manufactured controversyhas sold millions of copies and is a GOTY seasonal favorite.
So yes, the PlayStation 5 has had a good year on paper, but how much of that is actually the result of Sony’s own work? When all is said and done, I’m sure the company will have a great earnings report after the fiscal year, and it will have no incentive to learn from the failed projects and laid-off employees.
The problem with Sony’s near-monopolistic hold on this generation’s AAA console market is that PlayStation as a brand has become so ubiquitous that it no longer needs an identity. Incredible games find their way to the PlayStation 5 more often than any other console, whether that’s because the Switch 2 can’t run them properly or because developers decides that releasing on Xbox, with its smaller attachment rate, isn’t worth the risky investment. So yes, PlayStation has “won” the imaginary console war, and now its internal lineup doesn’t have to stand out like it once did. The company can release a big AAA-ass video game every now and then and win big prizes. Most of the PlayStation production in recent years has felt influenced by prestige television, with cinematic games such as The last of us And God of war becoming the video game equivalent of Oscar bait, garnering praise and acclaim every year. These games may be the last echo of the time when PlayStation moved artistic mountains, but today they feel like they exist largely to keep an assembly line of failed live-service efforts afloat, and none of the smaller, quirkier, or more low-stakes experiences that once made the PlayStation catalog the most diverse of any console maker are anywhere to be found.
Last year Astrobot was released, a celebration of PlayStation history that was noticeably short on characters and references to PlayStation 5 games. If that game had launched in 2025 instead, I don’t think that would have changed. The PS5 has been a huge financial success for Sony, so it doesn’t really need to be anything else in the eyes of those making the big decisions. PlayStation has always been a company, but now it’s the people who take the stage at events like E3 and pitch people on a specific, defined experience that PlayStation has to offer have largely left the company because it has abandoned passion projects like Gravity rush, Dreaming, And Cunning Kuiper to try (and repeatedly fail) to join the live-service rat race. Even the games that were once among the brand’s strongest artistic statements will bleed dry until the integrity these works once had is but a distant memory.
We’re now five years into the PS5 generation, and despite being the “most successful” console ever in Sony’s lineup, the company has remarkably little cultural cache to show for the PS5’s name becoming the video game equivalent of everyone calling a bandage a “Band-Aid.” And hey, it looks like you can iron out all those wrinkles, quirks, and charms and still reach the top of the video game food chain. In two generations, moreover, PlayStation has achieved the kind of ubiquity that Sony’s higher-ups probably wanted, and all it cost the brand was its soul.
