PS5’s First 5 Years of Games VS PS4’s At This Point in Their Lifecycle (and The Clear Winner)

We are approaching the fifth anniversary of the PlayStation 5‘s worldwide launch, prompting many to look back at the console’s performance thus far. As anyone keyed into games media or online gaming forums is likely already aware, sentiment around the PS5 hasn’t been entirely positive: there have been accusations of a poor first-party output, and an ostensibly smaller leap forward in visuals and performance relative to prior console generations.

It’s clear that the PS5 is more powerful than its predecessors—there’s a bevy of cross-generation games that demonstrate this disparity—but that doesn’t matter as much as the actual games that are available, at least for the average consumer. Indeed, at the end of the day, it’s all about what sorts of experiences people can have on the platform, and how those experiences compare to what they may be missing on, say, the Nintendo Switch. So, is there truth to the notion that the “PS5 has no games”? How does it stack up against the first five years of the PS4, a console that’s often considered to have one of the best exclusives lineups of all time?

PS4 vs. PS5: Which Console Had More Compelling Exclusives After Five Years?

Notable Exclusives from the PS4’s First Five Years

Notable Exclusives from the PS5’s First Five Years

The PS5 Holds Its Own, but the PS4’s First Five Years Were Clearly Better

Before making this list, I had expected the PlayStation 4 to clear the PlayStation 5’s exclusives lineup with no problem, but the PS5 isn’t actually as far behind as I had anticipated. The obvious highlights of the newer console’s exclusives are Ghost of Yotei, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and Astro Bot, which all push the hardware to its limits and provide experiences that would be hard to find on older consoles (DS2 has especially great graphics, with some gamers jokingly calling it “the first PS5 game”). Other notable PS5 exclusives from the past half-decade include Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Returnal, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

But those are essentially the only major, “true” exclusives the PS5 has to its name: several of the console’s other claims to fame, like Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok, are also available on the PS4, albeit with lower resolutions, lower FPS limits, longer load times, et cetera. Additionally, many of the PS5’s biggest exclusives up to this point have either been timed exclusives, releasing on other platforms after a year or so, or remakes; the console even launched alongside Demon’s Souls, a shot-for-shot remake of the 2009 classic.

Compare this to the PlayStation 4’s exclusives lineup at the five-year mark, which is composed of far more ambitious and genre-defining projects like Horizon Zero Dawn, Bloodborne, and God of War. Crucially, these are games that weren’t released on the PS3, and probably wouldn’t have been able to run on those platforms, period: these games felt more like true “next-gen” experiences, fully leveraging the leap in hardware prowess from the previous hardware line. We are just now starting to see obvious, immediate differences between PS5 and PS4 games, whereas the differences between, say, Uncharted 4 and Uncharted 3 were remarkable and undeniable. Maybe history will look more kindly upon the PS5’s lifelong exclusives catalog, but for now, it seems obvious that the PS4’s first five years were more exciting, envelope-pushing, and technologically significant.