The PlayStation 5 launched on Nov. 12, 2020 looking like a skyscraper in Dubai. Its white panels flare out like wings, sandwiching a black interior that glows with a thin strip of light. The whole thing rises with the confidence of a building you can see from space. It gestured toward an ambitious future.
A skyscraper can signal growth, yet it is ultimately a fixed point. It dominates skylines by standing still. Five years on, the PS5 has taken on that same role in gaming, its vertical swagger towering over the market as the dominant standard-bearer of high-end video game home technology. But the view around it has barely shifted. The skyline of modern gaming doesn’t look much different from 2020.
The PS5 launched in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, following on the smashing success of selling 117 million PlayStation 4 consoles. Where past PlayStations arrived as causes of celebration, the PS5 emerged into our reality as a bizarre event, excitement dampened by supply chain woes. Despite an inconvenient start, the PS5 has sold more than 84 million consoles in five years as of this month, outpacing its predecessor despite being more expensive. (And it’s only grown in price.)
The task wasn’t easy, says Eric Lempel, PlayStation’s senior vice president and head of worldwide marketing and consumer experience. Lempel helped launch every PlayStation console except for the first one, and the pandemic presented a unique challenge for the firm: How do you sell a video game console without anyone ever touching or seeing the thing in person?
“When we introduced new products in many parts of the world, we let the press come in; there was an ability to call consumers in different parts of the world to a specific place to start demoing games. But none of that could happen,” Lempel tells The Washington Post. They had to “completely change” their marketing, he said, doing it all online.
When I interviewed him during the PS5’s launch, I remember PlayStation’s then-CEO Jim Ryan being exasperated and exhausted from navigating a global crisis. The console’s success is a testament to that work. Before heading PlayStation, Ryan has always been a logistics wizard, instrumental in building the European market for the company.
“Jim was an absolutely incredible leader at that time, pulling on everything he learned from his career and having to reinvent the playbook,” Lempel said.
The remake of the legendary “Demon’s Souls” made the console a necessary purchase for me on Day 1, still one of the finest-looking titles on the platform and one of the few truly exclusive pieces of software, alongside the whimsical “Astro’s Playroom” platformer game that comes packaged with each console.
Then the release schedule slowed, a consequence of the pandemic, with rising development costs that came with gamers’ raised expectations for technology and fidelity. Many, like the blockbuster sequel “God of War Ragnarok,” were cross-generation titles, projects released and developed also for the older PS4 console. “Ragnarok” would be among many Sony first-party sequels that refined more than reinvented what we played on the last generation. The PS5 became the place where the best versions of games lived, rather than where new visions were born. This is encapsulated by the PS5 Pro unit, a modest improvement on the PS5 that doesn’t fundamentally change the way games are played, just the way they look.
This is not a failure. It is the natural result of a console maker reaching maturity. The PS5 is the product of a company that spent three generations correcting mistakes and narrowing its focus. The PS3 was famously difficult to create games for because of its proprietary technology. From the PS4 on, Sony created machines that mirror closely what personal computers can offer. This built the runway for Sony’s still-evolving PC strategy, releasing once-exclusive titles to that market a year or so after its PS5 release.
The problem is that gaming does not stand still. The most important developments of the last decade have taken place outside the traditional console cycle: the rise of “live service” games, the growth of the PC as a mainstream platform, subscription experiments, influencer-driven discovery, the graying of the console audience, the resurgence of handhelds, the explosion of cloud infrastructure and the expanding price of high-end development. These forces shaped players more than the PS5 itself did. Sony’s own strategy reflects this shift. It spent the last five years chasing the massive PC audience, restructuring its studios around larger projects and experimenting with multiplayer games, several of them now canceled.
Last year, Sony published “Concord,” an expensive attempt at live-service multiplayer shooting games so rejected by audiences it was pulled off the shelves after two weeks, an unprecedented failure. The company’s only success was at least a stellar one, “Helldivers 2,” which isn’t from a studio it owns.
“It’s like any other form of art, you don’t necessarily know what’s going to work with the consumer,” Lempel said. “We have to be careful about where we place our investments. It’s healthy to say, ‘We’ve taken something this far and we just don’t think it’s going to work out right, so let’s cancel before we move forward.’ But we’re still very much committed to creating all varieties of games, including live services.”
It’s that variety — a hallmark of PlayStation’s earlier game library, as celebrated by last year’s award-winning “Astro Bot” — that’s been lacking from Sony’s stable.
Nicolas Doucet, director of “Astro Bot” maker Team Asobi, says he believes that level of creativity now springs from independent studios and developers.
He pointed to the groundbreaking title “Ico,” developed and published by Sony in 2001, as an example. If it came out today, “would that be a game that’s expected out of an indie or a major studio?” Doucet said. “The kind of scale has changed. I think to me, a game like ‘Ico’ would probably be coming out of a very small group of indie developers.”
And those indie games also have a home on the PS5, which helps bolster the console’s strength and value. PlayStation’s position as a market leader means that despite the slow drip feed of Sony titles, the platform still has more games than any human can hope to play.
“I think the quality of games has gone up significantly, because I think today we are spoiled for choice,” Doucet said. “I mean, I collect a lot of old games, too, and I can tell that per system, I would say the quality has generally gone up.”
There are many bright spots for PlayStation atop the plateau. The console’s responsive interface, quiet operation and instant loading still feel luxurious. And for developers such as Sony’s Sucker Punch Productions, maker of the critical and commercial hit “Ghost of Yotei,” it’s a joy to make games for.
“It’s a really solid architecture that is very flexible, lets us do a lot of things at scale with the GPU, particle systems [and] cloth movement, adding a lot of reactivity to the world,” said Adrian Bentley, Sucker Punch’s lead programmer.
Doucet’s “Astro Bot” makes full use of the controller, which remains the PS5’s most distinct flourish. Other consoles can match its horsepower, but nothing else feels quite like it. Only in “Astro Bot” is the player showered in candy-colored diamonds while the controller seems to pitter-patter through the fourth wall itself. That blurred boundary between screen and hand made the PS5 feel like a brand-new piece of tech, creating a sense of physical magic that no software update or hardware revision has managed to replicate.
It’s too bad third-party developers don’t use those features as much (an issue also seen with Nintendo’s quirky console designs).
“I wouldn’t say it’s super hard, but it definitely takes some effort,” Bentley said when asked about the time needed to implement those extra features. “The most difficult thing is getting the feel right. Like with writing kanji, for example, in ‘Yotei,’ we had to figure things out, like, how precise do you want the user to actually ‘paint,’ because it can slow you down if you’re doing every single stroke as precisely as possible. … It depends on the game and how effective it would be, but we have definitely found some fun use cases in our part.”
Five years on, the console reflects the industry’s struggle in distinguishing technological leaps and true innovation. The PS2 delivered a revolution in scale and variety. The PS3 carved out a high-definition future through stubbornness and eventual triumph. The PS4 restored clarity and momentum after years of confusion. The PS5 is the generation where everything worked as intended. It is a brilliantly engineered monument to the modern standard of gaming.
It’s important to note that a plateau is not a decline. It’s a quiet stretch of a mountain ridge after a long climb, the view you reach after the hard part is over. The scenery is beautiful, but game developers and their audiences are now searching for the next ascent.
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