Topic: What year will this happen to the ps4?

I mean, what year will their stop being new releases,and the only thing that releases on the console are the yearly sports games? Im guessing sometime in late 2021 perhaps? Your thoughts?

@hulkie 2023 at the earliest. I reckon we'll have at least 1 other budget hardware revision before the fat lady sings.
PS4 has a wildly large install base, a lot of which won't be stumping up for a PS5 anytime soon. And since it should be BC, people can keep on playing PS4 and buying games for it until their current consoles die.

Also, I would expect more than a few digital releases to be cross compatible anyway. So there's a chance that for the lifetime of the PS5, PS4 compatible games will carry on being released digitally anyway.

I agree, 2023 at the earliest. Rumor has it next year the PS4 Pro will be the base model at $299.

Thanks everyone. Also I truly believe that ps5 will arrive sometime in very late 2020.

That very much depends by new releases. History has told us that Sony tend to support their consoles for around 10yrs and it will depend on how well certain games scale down. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 released on PS3 but that game struggled on the older hardware and aspects were left out completely whilst also visually different - but it still released in 2015 - that was 2yrs after the release of the PS4.

The biggest factor will be how well games can scale down to the older hardware. Its virtually guaranteed that the PS5 will be targetting 4k and if games are 60fps, they could release a 1080/30 version - that's roughly 1/8th scale as its a quarter of the image size and double the render time. 720p for example is 1/9th the size of 4k and halving the frame rate doubles the amount of time both the CPU and GPU have so 720/30 is 1/18th scale. Its not quite that simple though but the PS4/Pro could have a few more years left.

The key though could be the CPU which isn't particularly capable. 8GB of RAM should be adequate for 1080p but if the next gen, as we expect, has a multi-thread CPU and decent clock speed, Games that push the CPU of the PS5, that could really be a problem to scale down.

Its very difficult to predict the future, especially where Tech is concerned. Games that could be scaled down for older consoles doesn't mean they will be - Sony themselves may not scale games down because they want you to buy the new gen. 3rd party multi-platform games could be scaled down, even changed a bit just to increase the sales they can get. It doesn't matter if the games run or look the same, just as long as there are people that will buy and that will depend on how many people are still using the PS4.

Scalability is the key to releasing games on older hardware and the number of potential sales will be what the publishers will be considering as to whether or not its worth scaling the game down. The power of the Pro won't affect things at all because if the PS4 can't run the game at 720/30, then the Pro won't run it at 1080p/30 because its not that much more powerful and shares a similar amount of RAM and only a small boost in CPU. Whether the Pro becomes the 'only' PS4 you can buy or not, Sony also stated that it will not receive software that the PS4 won't get.

@hulkie probably about 3 years after the PS5 is released so it depends on when that happens but i imagine the PS4 releases will dry up about 2025 at the latest