PlayStation 4

• 1. Introduction

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  The PlayStation 4 launched on the 15th of November 2013, and within its first 24 hours on sale in North America, one million units had already left store shelves. That was not an accident. It was the result of a deliberate campaign to win back players Sony had nearly lost during one of the most turbulent console launches in the company's history.

  What made the PS4 different from what came before it? Why did developers line up to praise it before a single consumer had touched one? And how did a piece of consumer electronics, announced at a hotel event in New York City in February 2013, go on to sell over 106 million units worldwide? The answers stretch from the architecture of a custom AMD chip to a fistful of policy decisions made on a stage at E3 2013 that the internet would not soon forget.

• 2. Lessons from the PS3

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  Lead architect Mark Cerny has said that development on Sony's fourth console began as early as 2008. At that point, the PlayStation 3 had barely been on shelves for two years, but the wounds from its launch were still fresh. Months of production delays had let Microsoft's Xbox 360 build a head start approaching 10 million units sold before the PS3 even arrived.

  Sony Computer Entertainment Europe CEO Jim Ryan said plainly that the company wanted to avoid repeating the same mistake. The PS3's notoriously complex Cell microarchitecture had frustrated developers; it was powerful, but building games for it required specialized knowledge that studios did not always have. For the PS4, Sony abandoned that approach entirely and moved to an AMD APU built on the widely understood x86-64 architecture. The shift was chosen specifically to make development cheaper and easier for third-party studios.

  To make sure the controller itself was right, Sony enlisted Bungie, the studio behind the Halo franchise, to consult on the DualShock 4's design, particularly for shooting games. By 2012, Sony was shipping development kits to studios. Those kits, internally codenamed Orbis, were modified PCs running the AMD chipset that would eventually power the final console.

• 3. The E3 Moment

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  At E3 2013, Sony turned a hardware announcement into a statement. Microsoft had revealed the Xbox One weeks earlier, and the news had not gone well: the console was priced at $499 in North America, and Microsoft had described strict policies around used game sharing that alarmed both players and retailers.

  Jack Tretton took the stage at Sony's E3 press conference and announced there would be "no restrictions" on the resale and trading of PS4 games on physical media. Software product development head Scott Rohde specified that Sony would also disallow online passes, calling the policies "consumer-friendly, extremely retailer-friendly, and extremely publisher-friendly". The PS4, meanwhile, would launch at $399 in North America, €399 in Europe, and £349 in the United Kingdom. That $100 price gap was not subtle.

  Pre-release reception from developers had already been building. Mark Rein of Epic Games called the architecture "a phenomenal piece of hardware". John Carmack, programmer and co-founder of id Software, said Sony had made "wise engineering choices". Randy Pitchford of Gearbox Software praised the amount of high-speed memory. Multiple game developers, speaking to Edge magazine, described the performance advantage of the PS4 over the Xbox One as "significant" and "obvious".

• 4. Inside the Machine

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  The PS4's APU was built by AMD in cooperation with Sony, combining a CPU and GPU on a single chip alongside a memory controller and video decoder. The CPU used two 28 nm quad-core Jaguar modules, giving a total of eight 64-bit x86-64 cores, seven of which were made available to game developers. The GPU delivered a theoretical peak of 1.84 teraflops. AMD itself described the chip as the "most powerful" APU it had developed to date.

  Memory was a particular point of emphasis. The console shipped with 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM running at a maximum clock frequency of 2.75 GHz with a bandwidth of 176 GB/s. That was 16 times the RAM found in the PS3. Secondary custom chips handled background tasks: downloading, uploading, and social features could all run while a game was in progress, or while the console sat in a low-power Rest mode.

  For storage, the base model shipped with a 500 gigabyte hard drive that users could upgrade themselves, a detail that drew specific praise from reviewers who noted the Xbox One's drive was not user-accessible. System Software 4.50, released on the 9th of March 2017, extended that further by enabling external USB hard drives of up to 8 TB.

• 5. The DualShock 4

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  Bungie's input on the controller showed in the finished product. The DualShock 4 kept the familiar layout of its predecessors but revised nearly every physical detail. The analog stick caps received a concave shape, borrowing a design from the Xbox 360 controller. The triggers and shoulder buttons were reshaped. The D-pad buttons were angled more steeply downward to give the thumb a natural resting center.

  The most discussed addition was a touchpad capable of detecting up to two simultaneous presses, which could also function as a button. Sony replaced the old Start and Select buttons with Options and Share; the Share button connected directly to the console's video recording, screenshot, and streaming tools. An LED light bar on the front worked with the PlayStation Camera to track the controller's motion and could shift color during gameplay to reflect in-game states, such as turning red when a player's health ran low.

  In October 2013, Shuhei Yoshida confirmed on Twitter that the DualShock 4 would also support basic functions when connected to a PC by USB. Sony followed that in August 2016 with an official wireless USB adapter for the controller, enabling full functionality on PC. By December 2016, Valve's Steam platform had added DualShock 4 support and customization through its existing Steam Controller APIs.

• 6. Social and Sharing Features

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  Sony described social features as a major design pillar for the PS4, though the features were made optional and could be disabled. The Share button on the DualShock 4 gave players access to the last 60 minutes of recorded gameplay at any time, letting them pull a screenshot or video clip and push it directly to platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Dailymotion.

  Share Play went further. It allowed a player to invite an online friend into their game session via streaming, even if that friend did not own a copy of the game. The remote user could take full control, or the two could play cooperatively as if side by side. Mark Cerny described the feature as useful when a friend is stuck: "You can even see that your friend is in trouble and reach out through the network to take over the controller and assist them through some difficult portion of the game." Share Play required a PlayStation Plus subscription and was capped at one hour per session.

  At E3 2017, Sony revealed the PlayLink line, which let players use smartphones as controllers through companion apps. Titles such as Knowledge is Power, Hidden Agenda, and SingStar Celebration launched on the 21st of November 2017. The initiative eventually ran into compatibility problems; by the 14th of December 2023, companion apps for several PlayLink titles including Chimparty, Frantics, and Hidden Agenda were no longer available for download on newer Android devices.

• 7. Hardware Revisions

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  On the 7th of September 2016, Sony announced two new models simultaneously. The first, model number CUH-2000, was a smaller revision of the original console with a rounded matte body and a form factor 40% smaller than the original. It launched on the 15th of September 2016 at the same price as the original PS4, with a 500 GB drive, USB 3.1 ports, Bluetooth 4.0, and 5 GHz Wi-Fi support. The optical audio port was removed.

  The same day brought the PlayStation 4 Pro, codenamed Neo and carrying model number CUH-7000. The Pro launched worldwide on the 10th of November 2016 at $399 in North America, €399 in Europe, and £349 in the UK. Its GPU offered 4.2 teraflops, more than double the original model. To achieve 4K rendering without forcing the cost of a much larger chip, Sony's technical chief Mark Cerny explained that the team used "streamlined rendering techniques," including checkerboard rendering, where the console renders only portions of a frame in a checkerboard pattern and uses algorithms to fill the gaps, then smooths the result with an anti-aliasing filter. Hermen Hulst of Guerrilla Games said the output was perceptively close enough to true 4K that players would not be able to see the difference.

  Sony issued a quieter internal revision of the Pro, model CUH-7100, in late 2017, and a further revision in October 2018, model CUH-7200, first seen in Red Dead Redemption 2 bundles, which used a different power supply cord and showed further acoustic improvements.

• 8. Sales and Legacy

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  The UK launch alone moved 250,000 units in the first 48 hours and 530,000 within the first five weeks. By the end of 2013, Andrew House announced at the Consumer Electronics Show on the 7th of January 2014 that 4.2 million PS4 units had sold through, alongside more than 9.7 million software units. The sales momentum helped Sony top global console sales during Japan's 2013 fiscal year, beating Nintendo for the first time in eight years.

  Nielsen data from August 2014 revealed that 31% of PS4 buyers at that point were owners of a Wii or Xbox 360 who had never previously owned a PS3. The console was drawing players Sony had not previously held. By October 2019, cumulative sell-through reached 102.8 million units, making the PS4 the second best-selling video game console of all time, behind only the PlayStation 2.

  When the PlayStation 5 launched in November 2020, a global chip shortage that ran from 2020 to 2023 complicated Sony's ability to meet demand for the new console. A Bloomberg News report from January 2022 noted that Sony had planned to end PS4 production at the close of 2021, but instead chose to continue manufacturing it to offset the PS5 shortage and protect component supply agreements. By the 22nd of March 2022, lifetime hardware shipments had reached 117.2 million units, and the final software sell-through figure of 1.181 billion games had been logged as of the 31st of December 2019.