The State Of The PlayStation 5 In 2023
The next-gen console finally became indispensable despite its most bizarre year yet
kotaku.com
A slick new VR headset, a “slim” console refresh, tons of flashy new accessories, and multiple exclusives, including the fastest selling PlayStation game ever, Spider-Man 2. The PlayStation 5 made big moves in 2023. So why does it feel like the console spent most of it resting on its laurels while flailing for a new direction?
It’s a strange time for PlayStation. Sony boasted to investors a target of 25 million consoles sold this fiscal year, while at the same time remaining almost completely silent about the upcoming prestige blockbusters the company’s known for. The PS5 now truly feels positioned to be the best platform Sony’s ever had, but it’s unclear what exactly comes next. A massive pivot to live-service games? A more powerful PS5 Pro? Uncharted 5?
Two things make a console great: its current games and its future ones. With the benefit of PS4 backwards compatibility, ongoing software updates, and a steady slate of new hits, the PS5
Two things make a console great: its current games and its future ones. With the benefit of PS4 backwards compatibility, ongoing software updates, and a steady slate of new hits, the PS5 is, by all accounts, a stellar gaming platform. At the same time, layoffs, high-profile departures, and game cancellations make it hard to know what will come next. It also doesn’t help that Sony is acting more secretive than ever. 2023 was the year Spider-Man 2 gave people a reason to buy a PS5. It was also the year where things got very, very weird.
The Hardware
The PlayStation ecosystem was inundated with new gadgets this year, though most felt focused on appealing to existing niches. PS VR2 offered a pricey upgrade to Sony’s existing virtual reality platform. The improvements, led by the most comfortable headset on the market, were noticeable, but didn’t move the needle on broader adoption. The lack of backwards compatibility and big new VR games didn’t help.
Sony has all but abandoned the initiative since an initial State of Play revealed a bunch of new and existing ports heading to the platform. Horizon: Call of the Mountain was an impressive first-party show piece for PS VR2, yet there’s no sign that other big first-party spin-offs are on the way. If you have the latest headset, you could be forgiven for feeling all but abandoned within months of its release.
The DualSense Edge was also an expensive upgrade, increasing the build quality of the existing PS5 controller and expanding its versatility and repairability. It’s another “if you can afford it, sure why not” addition to the PS5 ecosystem. “If you’re not the sickest of online-playing sickos, much of the perks the DualSense offers feel like a luxury,” Kotaku’s Kenneth Shepherd wrote in his review. “It’s objectively better than playing with a standard controller, but it comes at such a steep price.”
They same applies to the new PlayStation Pulse earbuds. Great for low-latency 3D audio while also featuring planar magnetic drivers for better sound quality, the $200 add-on nevertheless lacks things like noise canceling or pass-through. It’s a mixed-bag in a head-to-head matchup with Sony’s own competing InZone gaming earbuds. For the price, the Pulse earbuds probably could have done a better job of nailing the trade-offs for a less compromised feature set.
Nothing exemplified this trend more than the PlayStation Portal, a goofy-looking yet surprisingly sturdy and comfortable remote play handheld seemingly designed to appeal to a couple thousand diehard PlayStation fans. Another $200 accessory, it’s basically a DualSense with an LCD screen wedged in-between. There’s an Android OS, but no functionality outside of streaming games from an existing PS5, the results of which are decent but vary depending on WiFi speed.
It’s the perfect boondoggle for grinding out PlayStation trophies in bed, during football games, or while the kids are watching Bluey. The question remains, however, why didn’t Sony go the extra mile and make a more capable handheld that could also stream games from the cloud, or even play some natively? Maybe one is coming in the future. Or maybe the Portal is proof that while every other company is racing to make its own version of the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, Sony is content to never once again dare to fumble portable gaming as badly as it did with the PS Vita.
Sony concluded 2023 with a slight refresh of the PS5 itself. A new “slim” version is 30 percent lighter and comes with a swappable disc drive and a full 1TB SSD instead of the launch edition’s 800GB one. Otherwise, while the internal configuration shifted to bring down manufacturing costs, it’s effectively the same machine at a slightly higher price for the all-digital version, which starts at $450 now instead of $400.
The detachable disc drive, meanwhile, is $70 standalone and requires an internet connection upon setup to bypass DRM, much to the chagrin of gaming preservationists. It doesn’t look quite as sleek as past slim redesigns, complicating the PS5’s already unusual aircraft hangar style with an ugly black line across the middle. All of it—the console, VR headset, DualSense Edge, PlayStation Portal, and Pulse earbuds—can be yours for the not-so-low price of $1,650.
The Software
The PS5 interface was pretty barebones when it launched in 2020, missing many of the features players had become accustomed to on the PS4. This was the year some big firmware updates brought over those improvements, as well as plenty of new ones. While headlined by the addition of Discord integration, March’s 7.0 update streamlined things across the board, from notifications for when you have existing save data for a game in the cloud to less friction when trying to view and join friends’ gaming sessions
Game folders, the big addition last year, received the ability to filter games too in 2021. Choosing which games to add is one of those small but meaningful tweaks that makes managing a growing digital library less of a chore. A September update added even more features, including the ability to search folders and finally turn off the beeping sounds whenever the PS5 turns on. The PlayStation Store also became friendlier, adding accessibility tags to let players know which games have which customization options before they buy
Plenty of headaches remain, though. There’s no way to add folders directly to the main row of icons on the home screen, and lots of settings and features are still buried beneath too many unintuitive button presses. Social features are pegged to the Control Center that pops up when you press the home button, while managing data storage and other key functions are cordoned off in the top right of the home menu. And I still always mess up how to turn the console off.
Sony also ended Twitter integration on PS5 this year as it pivots social media sharing to the smartphone PS App. The PlayStation Stars rewards program added there still feels weirdly siloed as well. You can only initiate “campaigns” to earn coins redeemable for PSN cash from the app, and the collectibles you unlock can’t be viewed on PS5 either. It’s a neat idea that’s still incomplete, similar to Activity Cards, the console’s tool for keeping track of discrete challenges within a game and helping you complete them more efficiently.
The cards were great in Spider-Man 2, letting players warp around the map even quicker than the in-game fast-travel system to clean up those last few side-missions and collectibles. Implementation in non-first-party games is uneven though, and the cards aren’t always cleanly laid out and organized. Like Sony’s scattershot approach to hardware and accessories, the interface is full of good ideas that aren’t necessarily all pulling in the same direction. It’s messy, and in need of a more foundational overhaul than just another set of new features and tweaks. In the meantime, I’d love for trophy lists to stop defaulting to hidden even after I’ve revealed them and to finally be able to add folders to the home screen.
The Network and Services
Last year was the big PlayStation Plus revamp. This year Sony continued adding PlayStation classics to the subscription services’ back catalog and finally implemented cloud streaming for many of the PS5’s biggest games. It also dramatically raised the price of each tier of the new program, making it feel like a good time to really consider whether renting a vast library of games every month is better than just paying to own the ones you actually want to play outright.The annual prices went from $60 to $80 for Essential, $100 to $135 for Extra, and $120 to $160 for Premium. The bottom tier added plenty of great games this year, from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and OlliOlliWorld to Death’s Door and Callisto Protocol. The Extra tier’s Netflix-like library circulated in heavy hitters as well, from Devil May Cry 5 and Borderlands 3 to Destiny 2: The Witch Queen and Grand Theft Auto 5. There were some notable day-and-date releases on the service too, like the PS5 version of Rogue Legacy 2 and the SNES-style RPG Sea of Stars. And Sony continued adding older first-party exclusives to the back catalog, like Horizon Forbidden West and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.
The most expensive Premium tier was less impressive. Sony recently began rolling out cloud streaming on PS5, an additional perk that makes it easy to try a game before buying it or get started before finishing the download. Unfortunately, the performance, at least in my limited experience, isn’t great yet.
And the trickling out of PlayStation Classics, the main draw of the Premium tier for hardcore fans and retro enthusiasts, remains slow and full of random games that aren’t that exciting. Some months there are great additions like The Legend of Dragoon and Grandia. Other months, we get games like Ape Escape: On the Loose, the PSP remake of the original game which was already on the service. Some months no classics get added at all. Given that Sony sells them separately in the store anyway, anyone subscribed to Premium waiting for their favorite PS1, PS2, or PSP game would be better served by saving their money and just waiting until it’s available to buy.
At a time when rising prices are prompting everyone to reevaluate what subscriptions are actually worth holding onto, PlayStation Plus, feels harder than ever to justify—unless there’s a live-service multiplayer game you log into regularly, in which case it’s mandatory. The program keeps getting more complicated without actually getting much better in terms of value. As an example, Sony recently announced a rebrand of its movie streaming app and that PS Plus Premium subscribers would get access to a library of up to 100 movies.
Before you get too excited, the list included things ranging from Looper to Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV. It’s hard to know just how good of a deal this will end up being, but it doesn’t feel like the “super bundle” other services are chasing. I can see a future where Sony adds Funimation and Crunchyroll to PS Plus to sweeten the deal. Instead, this year the company retired the PS Plus Collection, a great onboarding perk for new PS5 owners that included excellent games like Nier Automata and Persona 5 Royal in the base version of PS Plus.
The PS5 has never been easier to recommend, but whether because of the pandemic, scattered initiatives pulling in too many directions, or both, it feels like the console is losing momentum as Sony figures out what’s next and how to make that work. One thing that might help: a brand-new upgraded console. Rumors continue to swirl about a PS5 Pro with beefier specs that will help deliver on some of the promises of this generation like consistent 60fps modes and ray-traced graphics. The new machine could arrive as early as the end of next year. By then, maybe players will have a clearer idea of what to expect from the rest of the PS5’s lifespan. Maybe Sony will too.
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