2y ago

Is the PS4 still a viable console?

One of my close friends decided that she's no longer enjoying games so she offered to sell it to me for really cheap (100$). I love gaming but since I switched to Mac a few years ago my choices have been very limited. I've been mostly playing indie games that are available on Mac. So I've been thinking about her offer.

The price sounds amazing but I'm not sure if it's still worth it considering the PS5 has been out for a good few years now. What do you guys think? Should I take it off her hands or should I save for a PS5 or an Xbox instead?

My main monitor is 1080p 75Hz by the way (Acer KG221Q). So buying a new generation console would mean that I might have to upgrade my monitor as well.

Edit to add: A new PS5 would cost 7 times as much in my country. That's also another thing to consider.

38 comments

I'm still rocking my PS4 Pro and haven't felt the need to upgrade to the PS5 yet. Plenty of good games on there and a lot of the new ones still release to PS4 too. There's cool exclusives on PS5 but not $500 cool exclusives imo. Well, closer to $600 after purchasing the game. So I'll continue to wait to upgrade. I'd say go for it because you can have a lot of fun on the PS4 still.

I still buy games for my PS4 and I am a very casual gamer who never plays online.
Picked up SF6 this month and it is awesome.

I don't know that looking at games as a release is necessarily a great vantage point, but they can certainly be seen as a haven for fun if you approach them with an open mind.
For me it was more of a switch from how I played vs what I played. I got into online MMOs some years ago and (like a lot of things I do in my life...) I threw myself into them for a while like a loony. I found I was investing far too much time and energy organizing events, raids, builds, spreadsheets, people, personalities, drama, ugh. It was like going to work for heaven's sake! 😂
Eventually I got burned out and stopped completely. When COVID hit, of course going out wasn't an option so I got back into playing more again but realized that I could still have fun without the whole hardcore approach. I became, for lack of a better description, part of the "filthy casuals" lol - something I have never for a minute regretted. My time is my own, I chase what I like, meet others in game, and just plain have fun now.

Who says you need to upgrade monitor for PS5? It supports 1080p 60 Hz perfectly fine, in fact most games run around 1080p when in Performance mode, and those that render higher res will give you free supersampling on that monitor.
PS4 and Xbox One were outdated and underpowered already on release, I wouldn't bother with them when you can play the same games on PS5 usually with better performance and/or graphics

Any console that lets you experience games that you will enjoy is worth it. Who cares about being caught up, the PS4 has a ton of fantastic games, and $100 is a great deal.
- Plus it has a large library of great games that can be found cheap/used. Easily worth $100
  Most of what you'd be playing on PS5 are PS4 games anyway
  
  Isn't that the sad truth. Not many system sellers on the PS5 as you would hope.

Oh yeah, all the time. I've never finished Skyrim because it feels so overwhelming. No Man's Sky presents a similar kind of challenge for me, though that one also pings my danger sense really hard - I have this weird fear of deep water and space. Places where I can't see what's on the other side and might come after me. That's why I'll never play Subnautica.

The old gray mare ain't what she used to be, but I think the PS4 is in better shape than the Xbox One at this point. It got KOF 15, the Xbox One didn't.
I say enjoy what you can afford. The PS5 will be there a month, a year, a decade down the line. There's still plenty of good software for the PS4, and the games still look magnificent, as games HAVE looked for fifteen years. Look, I grew up in the age of Atari and Nintendo. Even the super-old Xbox 360 looks like a work of science-fiction next to those.

Try not to look at it as getting a $100 of technology, but rather if you'd get $100 dollars of entertainment out of it.
- Just to add.
  Look at any hobby in your life and break out the money spent vs the enjoyment you got out of it.
  For example the Cinema costs me £10 and a film is 2 hours long, meaning my fun time costs £5 per hour.
  A £100 console would have to provide me 20 hours entertainment for it to be comparable to going to the cinema.
  These days any PS4 game will have 10-40 hours content, but buying them costs money. Popping on CEX website the most expensive PS4 games are £12. Assuning you only get 10 hours of fun from a game...
  The question you should ask yourself is are there 3 games on the PS4 you are interested in playing?

There’s obviously a huge backlog of games. So if you’re a patient gamer then you could absolutely be happy with it for awhile. But the age of crossover games seems to be over as publishers are fully embracing PS5/SeriesX

The backlog of the PS4 is one of the single best backlogs of any system. It will take you years to work through that backlog and the games will be cheaper too since they aren’t new releases anymore. If I were you, I would take her up on the offer and buy the PS4. The PS five will be where the new games go, but those same new games will have a large price tag.

Go for it. If money's a major concern, there are many PS4 demos you can't play on PS5 and there are still only so many PS5 games that aren't on PS4

Just save for PS5/Xbox, I recommend PS5 cause their exclusives atm actually are quality works(with good track records.)
But like with anything else, you should just check what games you actually like and want to play, then pick the more cost efficient approach. :)

Yes, consider popping in an ssd in place of the hdd if you have a few more pennies to spare.

I'd say it'd be worth it; imo PS5 is rather "useless" unless you care so much about FPS now, might be a good idea to buy it in 2-3 years where it'll actually have more than half an exclusive (+the price will drop further by then)

Up until before FFXVI launched? Probably. Now they’re for sure moving away from PS4 though. You can still get recent games on it but going forward I wouldn’t expect much.

The Doom 1.0 demo, at the time, fitted on one and a half HD 3.5" floppy disks and was absolutely mindblowing. It really felt like taking a look into the future of virtual reality and showed what the peak technology of the time (silky smooth on a 486 DX2 with a PCI graphics card ... there was one at school I had access to, lol) was capable of!
Not a game, but the State of the Art demo for the Amiga was similarly mindblowing ... a full music video on one SH floppy disk :-)

People pay more for things like super Nintendo analogs.
Just depends if it's something that interests you.

Yeah. I think picking up the PS4 isn't a bad idea at all. You would get the benefit of being able to sell that PS4, while you keep saving, if you still want the PS5. I'm confident you would get your money back out of the PS4

For only 100 bucks definitely yes. Its still a good console and has lots of games. If you want a PS5 you can still upgrade later but at least get to enjoy more games now.

If you want to game and only have a Mac, I think the $100 will be money well spent. There are tons of great PS4 games and many great ones still being released every day. There are a very few PS5 games that are exclusive but most are released on both platforms.
If you can stand knowing that you aren't on the very latest thing and just enjoy playing games, a last gen console is a great option for 90% of the experience for often half the price (ps4 versions of the same games tend to be much cheaper too).

An Xbox Series S might be a happy middle ground. It’s current gen, like the Series X, but with a lower resolution target 1080p or 1440p generally, compared the the PS5 and Xbox Series X 4K. It’s significantly cheaper too.
PS4 and Xbox One won’t be getting any more first party games, and increasingly less and less first party ones.
Although if your friend is chucking in her games too, could be worth it if you haven’t played them.
- Funnily enough, I have another friend that wants to sell his Series S and switch to PlayStation. A while ago he said he's willing to sell it for 200 bucks. But I had have heard so many negative things about the Series S I kindly rejected his offer. Negative things such as how most games are capped at 30 fps, how the games look blurry, how it's holding back the quality games that would have been developed if it didn't exist etc. I can ask him if he's still looking for a buyer actually, but again, I don't know if the Series S is a good console. It certainly doesn't seem to have the reputation PS4 has.

Edit to add: A new PS5 would cost 7 times as much in my country. That's also another thing to consider.
While a PS5 would be notably better, I don't think it's 7x better. Get the PS4, there are over a decade of great games for it.

If you've never owned a PS4 before then you have nearly a decade's worth of games to catch up on. That'll keep you busy for a while until the PS5 comes down in price. I've had a PS4 since 2017 and I feel I don't have enough reasons to upgrade yet. I'm playing all sorts of PS4 games still. Today I just finished Yakuza Kiwami which is my first Yakuza game. Now I have a whole series to work on plus it's spin offs. By the time I get a PS5, the PS5 Pro or whatever will be out 😂

As you stated, there are countless of great games you haven't played. I think it is worth $100 unless you plan to buy a PS5/Xbox very soon.
You can try to find cheap pre-owned PS4 discs. Besides, you'd better have a look at PS Plus Extra Game list. Spending the price of 1.5 games, and you can enjoy 15+ games within one year.
For me I would not upgrade the monitor now. Only PS4 Pro support 4K gaming (for some games), I'd save the bucks for monitor upgrade in future.

Depends on what you want to play.
I use mine for WipEout Omega, Both GoW games, and both Horizon games.
That's it for me, as I'm a PC player otherwise.

So this is what I would do. https://ps4linux.com/batocera-ps4-v1-tutorial/

The back catalogue, plus No Man's Sky. You could spend a lot of time here and wait patiently for the PS5 to drop in price. Hell, FFXIV works great on it if you like MMOs.

I bought a PS4 in October of last year. It's been one of my favorite purchases in recent memory because there are so many games out for it, and if money is tight you can get a lot of the greatest hits of the platform for cheap!

People pay more for things like super Nintendo analogs.
Just depends if it's something that interests you.

People pay more for things like super Nintendo analogs.
Just depends if it's something that interests you.

For 100 bucks I'd consider it quite a steal.
Lots of great games and the graphics are still ok even if not stellar by today's standard.
I recently upgraded my PS4 with an SSD (another 100$ for 2TB and a bit of work) and that gave it a very nice boost in loading times.

I got one for $200 last year and think it was worth it. Don't think I'd ever really spend more than that on a gaming device

You might be able to jailbreak it and play emulators on it. I think even if I couldn’t I’d pick it up for $100, but if I could modify it, I’d totally pick up the ps4

38 comments