Topic: Will God of War: Ragnarok be last first-party PS4 game?

This year, it seems, all first party games from Sony will be both PS4/PS5 releases. My question is, do you think after this year (or whenever Ragnarok releases) Sony will continue releasing first party titles on both platforms?
If not, when do you think that point will come?

Think Spider-Man 2 was PS5 only, so let's hope Ragnarok is the last cross-gen title. The PS5 will be 2 years old by the end of this year, which is a long enough period to stop cross-gen support imo.

@WizzNL While I'm inclined to agree with you about two years being enough, I get the feeling this cross gen period may extend for another year.

i don’t know

I guess it might depend on the games and how much running on old hardware would affect their design. What I mean is: if they released a sequel to Sackboy a year from now, it would probably make sense to put it on PS4 too, as it potentially wouldn’t take too much work. Also: we know they have some online games in the works and cross-gen (or maybe even a simultaneous PC release) could be good for those too. Same for MLB 23, maybe.
I don’t think they’ll do another big AAA action adventure game on PS4 though.

Spiderman 2 already confirmed as ps5 only so I think that indicates the way forward for 2023.
We can probably only expect one more big game from guerrilla and santa monica this gen (other than psvr2 support) by which time the PS4 will be ancient.

Probably the 'last' big Single Player game from a First Party studio but whether the last first party game, I don't know. They may have some smaller AA type games that may come to both, maybe even a MP game like 'Factions' that may come too because it benefits the 'gamers'. More Gamers means fuller lobbies and better matchmaking, better matches too with lower 'ping' because more people in your area are playing, less language barriers etc.

The '3' big games we know of - Horizon: Forbidden West, GT7 and God of War: Ragnarok - were all expected to of released by now - all within the 'first' year of cross-generation platforms on the market. These were also 'started' quite some time before the PS5 specs were revealed, let alone before the PS5 released so the chances are, they started with PS4 in mind with perhaps the option to scale up visuals etc for PS5. However, I'd expect most games after would be developed with PS5 in mind which may not scale down well to PS4.

The ND MP could well be the 'last' game but we'll just have to see. I think if the situation over hardware supply doesn't pick up, then maybe Sony will rethink some games, try to 'scale' down if possible to become 'cross-gen' but if things improve, they won't port and scale down as that game could make people upgrade to PS5...

@jFug
‘We have always felt that we had a responsibility to serve that [PS4] community for several years after the launch of PS5 and that it represented a huge business opportunity for us," Ryan says.

May 2020

More and more PS5 only as time goes by but PS4 still is going to be supported here and there if a studio wants. I don’t think there is a timeframe.

I don’t know if we ever got a clear statement on it, but I was under the impression that Ragnarok may not have been originally planned as cross-gen. It seemed like it was a late announcement that it would come out of PS4, which makes me think it was only ported after it became clear that PS5 scarcity was going to hold back sales. I’m kind of pulling this theory out of thin air, but I wonder if the world had been “normal” (without a pandemic and chip shortage) then Sony would be pulling us into full PS5 mode by now.

Seems that cross-gen games from PS3 to PS4 were mostly third party. I could be misremembering, but AAA game-wise it was what — GTAV, Persona 5, MGSV (wow, that’s a lot of 5’s) AC Black Flag, COD and Battlefield and all the annualized sports stuff, Shadow of Mordor, Destiny, Life is Strange, Need for Speed…. Am I forgetting anything? I actually can’t think of a first party cross gen game on PS3 and PS4 (outside of MLB maybe).
Certainly nothing on the order of HFW, Ragnarok, GT7, and Miles Morales.

@Th3solution While they never said that about Ragnarok, I do believe Gran Turismo was originally announced as a PS5 exclusive.
As for cross-gen Sony games - Resogun was ported back to PS3 and Vita a year later, which is a curious case (but also hardly an AAA game). Other than that, the Last Of Us was originally released before the PS4 but re-released on it the next year. That's the closest to cross-gen I can think of.

@Voltan I remember the Last of Us re-release being pretty quick after PS4 came out, but was marketed as a “Remastered” game, as I recall. I forgot about Resogun being ported backwards after the fact.

@Th3solution Well yeah, it was called TLoU Remastered but I'm pretty sure it would still look like that on PS4 if it just launched on both platforms at the same time
It was only 1 year apart - a few months before the PS4 and a few months after.

@Voltan Certainly the line between “cross-generation release” and “remastered version” is blurry. Essentially they are the same thing, I suppose.

Outside of performance patches like GoW and HZD got, the PS5 re-releases (or “Director’s Cuts”, “Definitive Editions” etc.) can also be considered remastered/cross-gen games. Ghost of Tsushima comes to mind as it also had the full fledged PS5 release merely a year after the release on PS4.
In fact, GoT is more a cross-gen game than Cyberpunk 2077, if you think about it. It’s been over a year and we still don’t have the PS5 release for that game, and it was supposed to be a cross-gen release. 😅

With MM, HFW, GT7, and GoW, they two versions should come out side-by-side, which is the difference I guess. Imagine the uproar if only one version of HFW came out while the other console had to wait. I suspect this is part of the delay for these 3 games — along with the pandemic, they are having to run quality control and fix bugs on two versions of these games simultaneously. We probably could have had GT7 on PS5 a few months ago.