Why Doesn't PS5 Have Games?
You've no doubt come across memes about how the PlayStation 5 doesn't have any games on it. It's been extremely persistent throughout the past few years despite the fact that by all metrics, the PS5 is absolutely dominating it's primary competition, the Xbox Series X/S, and also despite the fact that it, you know, actually does have games on it. People treat it as though a game getting ported to PC or to another competing platform as though they're somehow "losing" them, even though it's overall the more pro-consumer move as it allows people who invested in other platforms to have more choice in what to play, while also allowing Sony to get purchases from people who would have never bought a PS5 to begin with. Seems like a win-win situation to me.
Recently, Sony seems to have pulled the plug on bringing games to PC, which naturally lead to a lot people being upset. Of course, there are plenty of people still wishing to saber rattle for the console wars and claiming it's a huge win for Sony, but, I mean, is it? It's probably doesn't take a whole lot of resources to port games to PC overall and it's a nice secondary revenue stream.
(The origin point of the phenomenon. Image credit KnowYourMeme)
This meme has always kind of puzzled me. There are technically quite a lot of PS5 games, and the hardware itself is currently the 8th best selling console of all time, trailing roughly ~25 million units behind the PS4 and roughly 68 million behind the PS2, the best selling console of all time, and the console is still being sold so it will no doubt crack 100 million sooner or later. The problem is that it doesn't feel like the PS5 has a lot of games on it, and so people complain about the lack of exclusives, despite the fact that in this day and age launching games as exclusives does not seem to be good business.
I have a PS5. Well, technically, it belongs to my partner, she bought it before we met and these days neither of us really use it that much. It gets used more often as a Blu-ray player because we both generally prefer to play games on PC. Every now and then an Astro Bot or a Death Stranding 2: On the Beach comes along that we're interested in and purchase on PS5, but it's the exception rather than the rule. I guess in that sense, it should be easy for me to understand the "PS5 has no games" meme because we don't really use it, but a lot of the games we play on PC are games that we could also be playing on PS5; we just happen to prefer the one platform over the other. I think there are multiple angles to why this meme is so persistent, however.
The first and easiest one to explain is value proposition. The PS5 (with disc drive) cost $499 at launch, and due to a lot of economic factors that are too much for this one article, the price of PS5 consoles has kept going up instead of down, with the same model PS5 now going for $650, a 30% increase in pricing despite the fact that historically, consoles have gone down in price after launch, not up. It was already a huge purchase and people want to feel like they're getting value out of it, and for a lot of people, it simply hasn't felt that way. If you're a serious gaming fan who owns the PS5, there's a decent chance you own some other contemporary hardware capable of playing modern games, such as a desktop PC, Switch 2, or maybe even the Xbox Series X/S for some reason. A lot of these games have also been cross platform or ports from previous generation consoles to this generation. If you can play most games on PS5 on another platform you own, then I can understand how it doesn't feel like you're getting good value for the box you spent several grand on. I don't think that alone explains why this meme has been so persistent, though.
I think the bigger reason is that Sony used to develop and publish a much larger variety of games. There is no more Twisted Metal, there is no more Ape Escape, there is no more Wild Arms, there is no more Jak and Daxter, et cetera et cetera. All games are eventually platform agnostic due to emulation anyway, and when we look back at great games from the PS1 and PS2, if they persisted as franchises, sooner or later they end up being brought forward to modern PlayStations, or just all platforms in general. What we're witnessing is that there aren't a lot of games that people like and associate specifically with the PS5. Nobody cares about Destruction All-Stars, Demon's Souls is a remake of a PS3 game, Stellar Blade is overshadowed by it's blatant inspiration of NieR: Automata, God of War Ragnarök is a crossgen PS4/PS5 title, Helldivers 2 launched the same day on PC, and The Last of Us Part 1 is a remaster of a PS4 remaster of a PS3 game. I could keep going on, but you get the point.
Overall, Sony's output of games has homogenized into a pretty specific flavor of Big, Serious, Triple-A Blockbuster. Games like Astro Bot are the exception, they just don't make or invest into weird, experimental games like PaRappa the Rapper anymore, and Sony's Japan Studio, arguably the one most responsible for these kinds of games (including Bloodborne!), was effectively shut down in 2021. Years later, we would see the results of Sony's mismanagement, their over $200 million investment into Concord ended up completely blowing up in their face while Team Asobi, formerly a part of Japan Studio, went on to win Game of the Year with Astro Bot. Later, it came out that Sony reportedly had a dozen Live Service games planned (one of which was Concord), and eight of them ended up being cancelled. There's a lot to say about the Live Service gold rush that I don't really want to get into here, so let me just say: fucking lmao. Meanwhile, Nintendo has been releasing a bunch of smaller and more experimental titles that go on to great success, most recently, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Pokopia, which appear to reuse a lot of assets from Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
(image credit KnowYourMeme)
There's also just less games overall. Compared to the thousand or so games currently available for PS5, the PS2 had at least 4000 unique games produced for it, and had over 700 games release in 2005 alone. Development budgets and timelines have increased pretty dramatically since the 2000s, many major game releases demand you spend more and more time with them, and often need to sell a comically absurd number of copies to be profitable, sometimes a game that sells multiple millions of copies is still considered to be a financial failure. These games cost so much to produce that they need to reach as many people as possible in order to recoup costs, which is part of why "exclusivity" is no longer a benefit to publishers. These problems are all further exacerbated by the Live Service phenomenon, where games are designed to played daily for years, are dependent on an online service in order to run, and oftentimes the plug gets pulled shockingly close to launch if the game under performs expectations. The other side of the coin is that smaller games from independent publishers are much more common due to digital distribution but they are almost never designed with specific consoles in mind, and it doesn't make up for the dearth in smaller budget "AA" games that no longer seem to exist.
Or do they? That's something I think is actually changing. 2022's Evil West was praised for feeling like a throwback to the Xbox 360 days of straightforward action adventures, and more recent titles like Mafia: The Old Country, Silent Hill F, and Pragmata seem to be following in its double-A footsteps. These kinds of titles never really went away but they definitely seem to be experiencing a resurgence of late, and they're the kind of titles I would expect PS5 owners to be getting a kick out of, but they're not exclusives, so I guess it doesn't matter. We've seen how ballooning game budgets and the desire to create the ultimate live service "Super Game" have lead to failure time and time again again and again, and there's some signs that the market is beginning to correct for itself in that regard.
Well, there's also the fact that over 1/3rd of workers in the video game industry have been laid off in the past two years despite being more profitable than the film and music industries combined. In case it hasn't been obvious to this point, you are reading an explicitly anti-capitalist blog, because this is what capitalism does: it extracts the value of workers and then cuts them off because of the idiotic decisions of the people in charge, who almost never see any direct consequences for their own actions. Many people consider what's happening now, alongside the increased costs from tariffs and the RAM crisis, to be a game industry crash not unlike the one from 1983 (in the United States), which was primarily caused by overzealous business people thinking their games would sell far more than reasonably possible and collapsing the industry under the weight of their absurd decisions. Nobody deserves to be laid off because the game they helped make only sold a few million copies. Video games are art, and art will continue to exist beyond capitalism because people inherently want to create art, but capitalism hinders art and creativity because it chains it to the machinations of money people who only desire to make more money, and their irrational pursuit of irrational amounts of money end up bringing down everyone else.
So, there you go, I solved it. The PS5 doesn't have any games because of capitalism. Now we just have to dismantle the structure that our entire society is built around. No problem, right?