What Happened With PS5 Exclusives This Generation?
In a recent, large-scale report on the state of the company and brand, Sony said that the upcoming PlayStation 6 was 'top of mind' for the company, with some estimates putting it at a potential 2027 release date. But that raises a question. Despite its solid sales, was this…actually a good generation for PlayStation, namely its PS5 exclusives?
It's been a strange generation. The concept of 'true' PS5 exclusives, ones maximizing the power of the new system without being cross-gen with PS4 at the same time, has been limited.
We might as well start with what's arguably the biggest success, at least critically, PlayStation's most Nintendo-like game, Astro Bot. The GOTY winner was in fact PS5-only, and was a celebration of PlayStation itself. Fantastic!
Moving on from there, we have a pair of Final Fantasy games, First, XVI, where there's some debate about whether that underperformed, and now it's no longer exclusive to PS5 at all, having hit Xbox. The other is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the next installment after Remake, which was a PS4 launch game, putting it in a weird space.
Final Fantasy XVI
You can count the Demon's Souls remake, but that is, of course, a remake. Ratchet and Clank was a solid, if not overlooked, demonstration of PS5 tech in a way practically no other games utilized. Returnal is a bit of a cult favorite among some at this point but did not sell terribly well.
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One of the most successful PS5-only games was Stellar Blade, from a studio and IP Sony doesn't even own, but credit to them for seeing the potential and landing that deal. Helldivers 2 was a huge hit, but it had a day-and-date release on PC, where Steam was the larger platform for the game.
Finally, we have the most 'major' release to date, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which tripled the cost of the first game arguably without being significantly better, reusing large chunks of the old city and adding a character that was already added in a previous side-game. Projects like a Venom spin-off and a Spider-Verse multiplayer game were cancelled. Thankfully, we have Ghost of Yotei, PS5 only, out this fall. I would not be surprised if that ended up being the best non-Astro Bot PS5 exclusive. Hopefully, at least.
Ghost of Yotei
I listed a decent amount of games there, yes. But how many games of true significance? Taking a step back, this entire generation, we did not see a PS5-only game from Guerilla, Sony Santa Monica or Naughty Dog, the last of which became a meme for its endless remasters of its Last of Us games. Naughty Dog has announced Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, but that may not be out until PS6 itself. We have no idea when either new Horizon or God of War games are coming from those studios, much less them branching into potentially new IPs instead of endless sequels. Sony purchased Bungie this generation for $3.6 billion, but it did little except drift on with Destiny 2 and hammer away at a game that seems on the verge of bombing, Marathon. And neither of those games are exclusive, much less PS5-exclusive.
It's not like there was nothing to play, but true PS5 exclusives were few and far between, and it's a situation where the most significant introduction of a new IP was Stellar Blade, not even a game from Sony directly, merely a deal it had secured. The same goes for Final Fantasy, where Square Enix seems to now be realizing locking themselves to PlayStation this tightly may be a sales mistake.
None of this is to say that Xbox, in contrast, had some great console generation. I've devoted a lot of ink to its collapsed hardware sales, and the concept of an Xbox exclusive is close to not existing at all now. But if we're comparing the PS5 to past eras, I'd probably rank it fourth or even fifth in terms of what it has produced in terms of true exclusives. We'll see if the PS6 can change that, whenever it arrives.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
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