The State Of PlayStation In 2025

If you were to ask Sony executives about PlayStation’s 2025, they’d probably tell you it was great. According to the company, the PS5 is already its “most successful” console generation after only five years. Thanks to all the money Sony’s made through microtransactions and subscription services like PlayStation Plus, the system the internet claims has “no games” is eclipsing its predecessors (as long as you don’t adjust for inflation), and it presumably still has a few years left in it. But does Sony actually have anything to show for it in year five?

While it’s beating out previous PlayStations in terms of revenue and the hardware sales have been staggering, the PlayStation 5’s lifespan has also been defined by live-service flops, studio closures, and time-biding remasters. Throughout the PS5 era, Sony has been devouring money, but hasn’t been offering the kinds of big (and small) exclusives defined by identifiable characters, experiences, and stories that were once synonymous with the brand. 

By 2024, the PS5 seemed like a cultural black hole despite its success. Did 2025 get things back on the right 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 run well on Switch?

The hardware

While the PlayStation 5 is still a raging success for Sony, it, like most other video game hardware, was hit with a price hike. This followed the Trump administration’s new tariffs (though the device’s price was raised in other territories outside of America, as well), 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, regardless of which SKU you buy. The standard edition costs $549.99, while the digital edition without a disc drive now costs as much as the disc-drive version did in 2020 at $499.99. The PlayStation 5 Pro, meanwhile, has been raised to a whopping $749.99, which is a hefty asking price for something that hasn’t made much of an impact.

© Sony

Historically, console prices are supposed to go down as a generation goes on. Sony has already said that the PS5 is entering the “later stages of its life,” and the PS6 is supposedly on the way. But even as the PS5 enters its twilight years, it’s more expensive than ever. The only time you probably would’ve paid more for the thing is when it was scarce and scalpers were reselling it. (A cheaper model was also released in Japan earlier this year, but it’s region-locked.)

The PS5 may have gone up in price, but one of its peripherals went down and stayed there. The PlayStation VR2’s $550 price tag nosedived to $400 in February following reports that Sony had halted manufacturing the headset as it struggled to meet its original projections. This makes it not unsurprising that Sony itself didn’t do much to support the PSVR2 in 2025. A few notable third-party projects like Lumines Arise, Hitman World of Assassination, and Alien Rogue Incursion kept the VR sickos fed, but Sony didn’t do much of note with the thing in 2025.

Also on the hardware side, Sony is finally making the PlayStation Portal what it always should have been. The streaming handheld was previously a Remote Play machine that let you stream your PS5 to it, but now the device can stream games directly from the cloud, rather than bouncing them off another system.

The software

Broadly speaking, booting up a PS5 hasn’t changed much in 2025. Yeah, Sony brought back a few dynamic themes after previously making them a limited-time flourish, but beyond that, scrolling through the system’s 2025 system software patch notes shows a lot of small quality-of-life changes, a few accessibility updates like the addition of an audio focus option to make soft sounds come through on headphones more clearly, 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 in a pretty alright place. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.

The services

The PS5’s price wasn’t the only one Sony raised this year. The cost of PlayStation Plus, the subscription service that lets users play online, add free monthly games to their collection, and stream a huge library of older titles at higher tiers, was also hiked in April in multiple countries, and Sony is open to doing it again. This wasn’t the first time Sony’s done this in the PS5 era, either. It feels like as more people are putting time into free-to-play games, Sony is looking for different ways to squeeze some juice out of them through subscriptions and microtransactions.

© Sucker Punch

The games

But none of the above matters if the games aren’t there. The PlayStation 5 has ingrained itself so completely into the public consciousness as the de facto video game console on your TV that Xbox won’t tell us its sales numbers anymore. As a result of its market domination, the success of any PS5 game can be considered a PS5 win by association. Huge breakthrough games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 don’t even have to be Sony games for the PS5 maker to benefit. Fortnite can continue to scrape in billions in revenue and if those microtransactions happen through the PlayStation Store, Sony’s getting a cut. So what is Sony actually doing with the hypothetical freedom you get from being top dog? In 2025, not a lot.

Continuing a grim trend from recent years, Sony studios in 2025 were repeatedly hit by layoffs after live-service projects failed to take off. And yet, PlayStation higher-ups continue to insist that this is the way forward for the company that was once defined by more than a desperate need to hook someone into dailies and microtransactions. Marathon was delayed even as Destiny 2 is struggling, so the major PlayStation pillars this year were Death Stranding 2, which will eventually go to other platforms, and Ghost of Yotei, which, despite manufactured controversy, has sold millions of copies and is a GOTY season darling.

So yeah, the PlayStation 5 has had a good year on paper, but how much of that is actually the result of Sony’s own legwork? When all is said and done, I’m sure the company will have a wonderful earnings report after the fiscal year is over, and it will have no reason to learn anything from its failed projects and fired workers. 

The problem with Sony’s nearly monopolistic hold on the AAA console market this generation is that PlayStation, as a brand, has become so ubiquitous that it doesn’t need an identity anymore. Incredible games make their way to the PlayStation 5 more than any other console, whether that be because the Switch 2 can’t run them well or because developers decide that releasing on Xbox, with its smaller attachment rate, isn’t worth the risky investment. So yeah, PlayStation has “won” the imagined console war, and now its internal line-up doesn’t have to stand out the way it once did. The company can just release a big AAA-ass video game every once in a while and get major awards buzz. Most of PlayStation’s output in recent years has felt influenced by prestige television, with cinematic games like The Last of Us and God of War becoming the video game equivalent of Oscar bait, lapping up praise and acclaim every year. Those games are, perhaps, the final echoes of the time when PlayStation was moving artistic mountains, but nowadays, they feel like they exist largely to prop up an assembly line of failed live-service efforts, and none of the smaller, quirkier, or more low-stakes experiences that once made PlayStation’s catalog the most diverse of all the console makers’ are anywhere to be found.

© HBO

Last year Astro Bot was released, a celebration of PlayStation history that was conspicuously lacking in 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 have to be anything else in the eyes of those who are making the big decisions. PlayStation has always been a business, but now the people who used to come out on stage at events like E3 and pitch people on a specific, defined experience that PlayStation could offer have mostly left the company as it has abandoned passion projects like Gravity Rush, Dreams, and Sly Cooper to try (and repeatedly fail) to enter the live-service rat race. Even the games that were once some of the brand’s strongest artistic statements will be bled dry until whatever integrity those works once had is just a distant memory.

We’re five years into the PS5 generation, and despite it being the “most successful” console ever in Sony’s line-up, the company has remarkably little cultural cache to show for it beyond 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 make it to the top of the video game food chain. In two generations on top, PlayStation has achieved the kind of ubiquity the Sony higher-ups probably wanted, and all it cost the brand was its soul.