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A gut check, five years into the PS5 and Xbox Series era

Graphic: Grant Walkup/Polygon | Source images: Sony; Microsoft

Five years after launch, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, a console generation that was supposed to define the future of gaming, feels more like a strange detour. Released in the shadow of a global pandemic, the hardware upgrades arrived with massive anticipation. Their legacies are... harder to pin down. Sony broke sales records even as players questioned the value of the PS5 era, while Xbox blurred the lines between hardware and ecosystem, leaving its consoles behind. An avalanche of games has yielded few exclusives that have felt defining. What happened?

This week, Polygon revisits the so-called “next-gen” era in a special series we’re calling The Lost Generation. We’ll explore the pandemic’s lasting impact on gaming, the strange trajectories of Sony and Microsoft, and the games that shaped — or failed to shape — the console cycle. These are the highlights, lowlights, and big questions about the future.

PlayStation 5 won the console war by default. What now?

Graphic: Grant Walkup/Polygon | Source images: Sony Interactive Entertainment

On top of all this, Sony has faced a direct rival, in Microsoft, that was distracted beyond all measure — by its increasing investment in PC gaming, by its Game Pass subscription service, by the cloud gaming future, and by its paradigm-shifting $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which transformed it overnight into a monstrously large third-party publisher. None of these strategic moves worked out to the benefit of Xbox consoles themselves, which ended up starved of focus and exclusive games, and lagging far behind PlayStation in sales.

Five years in, Microsoft has practically given up on exclusives and is publishing most of its titles on PS5; more sales for Sony. Next year will see Halo arrive on PlayStation. Symbolically, Microsoft has conceded the console war. The PS5 is victorious.

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The Xbox Series was the best Xbox yet. Then Microsoft lost all interest in it

Graphic: Grant Walkup/Polygon | Source images: Microsoft

The irony is that this fate has befallen Xbox on the heels of what might be its best console hardware ever — or at least since the ugly but impressively specced beast that launched Microsoft’s console initiative in November 2001. The title ought to belong to Xbox 360, with transformative online features that were undoubtedly the high point for the brand. But that console’s disastrous failure rate due to poor heat management, which led to the infamous “red ring of death” error, disqualifies it. And the less said about the misbegotten Xbox One, and its hastily abandoned ambitions to be a multimedia set-top box, the better.

Considered in isolation, the Xbox Series X and S are great machines. Delivering on the promise of the Xbox One X mid-generation upgrade, Microsoft’s engineers and designers hit every mark. The consoles are reliable, fast, and seamlessly easy to use; Quick Resume, better implemented than PlayStation 5’s alternative, is a quality-of-life feature that genuinely improves the quality of your life. The controllers have been perfected. Both consoles run silently and have been thoughtfully designed and updated with power efficiency in mind.

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Let’s name the greatest game of the console generation: round 1

Graphic: Grant Walkup/Polygon

A game console is nothing without its games. You can create the most sophisticated piece of tech out there or create a game-changing control gimmick, but it doesn’t mean much of anything if there aren’t good excuses to play with it. While Sony and Microsoft have had some, shall we say, uneven moments in this current console generation, both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X have delivered enough tentpole games to fill a tournament bracket.

Don’t believe us? We created our own to prove it.

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The console vibes are off

Graphic: Grant Walkup/Polygon | Source images: Sony; Microsoft

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, though it feels like the 50th. Global pandemics, violent political upheaval, and the rise of disruptive technology have a way of making time melty. But even in the microcosm of gaming, the half-decade life cycle of these two major consoles feels less like a new peak than a smoldering crater left after impact.

It all happened… we’re here… but where is here?

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