- Did you know that Sony still sell
the PS4 brand new for $330?
(dog groans)
What, $330?
Isn't that more than this was
when it first came out in 2016?
This is a brand new PlayStation 4.
No, not a PS4 Pro, a PS5, no, this is a PS4 Slim.
Why are they selling a $330 PS4
that's almost 10 years old when the PS5 exists?
Let's find out.
We're gonna crack the seal
on one of the very last brand new PS4s ever made.
(Austin exhales)
Goodbye, resale value.
(bird squawks)
Okay, it's done.
- You did it. - I did it.
- Congratulations. - Thank you, appreciate it.
So for reference, you actually
don't have to buy this specific console.
So Sony actually are also selling
the vanilla PS4s for 300 bucks.
You'll find them in stock at a couple of stores right now.
But it does seem like they made a lot more
of the "Modern Warfare" consoles, which are 30 bucks extra,
but does come with a digital copy of the game.
Oh, it's so little.
Manufactured September of 2022.
So it is confirmed.
This is a brand new console
that was manufactured just a few months ago.
So I spent about a week using the PS4 Slim
and there's a lot of stuff that I like
and a few things that I don't.
So first thing I did was actually upgrade the hard drive.
Since the PlayStation has started including hard drives
all the way back on the PS2,
you've always been able to do this
and it is very straightforward on the PS4 Slim.
This model comes with a one terabyte hard drive
which is totally fine.
But instead, for only 60 bucks,
I upgraded this with a one terabyte SSD.
Now, sure you can use the hard drive that comes with it
and it is going to be completely fine.
But having the SSD is going to give me,
not only a little bit more speed,
especially when it comes to load times,
but importantly, if you are using a 500 GB PS4,
you're gonna notice a very, very real problem.
PS4 games have gotten huge.
I kind of knew this from the PS5,
the games are 70, 80, 90 GBs.
But I didn't really realize the games on PS4,
even the base model,
are also still pretty much that same size,
meaning that five or six AAA games
and that 500 GB drive is full.
So going up to one terabyte, I think, is a no-brainer,
especially at 60 bucks.
It's easy, it's quick.
I'm not saying that you need to do this for your PS4,
but I do think it actually made
a little bit of a difference here.
Something else that I've found with PS4
is how much I like this interface.
Which to be fair, I also love the XMB on the PS3
and not to say anything negative about the PS5,
I think it's also a a nicely designed interface.
But I was really kinda struck,
especially with the SSD,
of just how snappy everything feels.
It could just be a little bit of a placebo
'cause it's not that big of a difference.
But it definitely felt kind of pleasant
going back to using the PS4.
There were also some legitimate advantages
to the software support on the PS4,
specifically when it comes to media.
So not only does it support more file formats than the PS5,
which doesn't support AVI or MPEG2,
this also has much better audio support with MOVs and MKVs
and the PS4 support subtitles,
which the PS5 is super spotty with.
It's almost like they want you to sign up for Crunchyroll
instead of downloading and loading up on a USB
or anime or something.
Not that Sony would ever do something like that
and nerf their newer console or anything.
Now, yes, you only have 1080p out on the PS4,
which I'll admit is a pretty big bummer.
If you're watching something like Netflix
and YouTube and stuff,
those are all pretty much the same experiences.
Especially if you plan on using the PS4
as a little bit more of a media machine,
there are some legitimate advantages to this
that the PS5 can't touch.
It does kind of feel like Sony
maybe watered the PS5 down a little bit,
probably because they want you to play games on it
and especially when you consider the fact
that if you want a disc drive in the PS5,
that's $200 more than this,
it does make actually the PS4 make a little bit more sense.
But, I wish it had 4K support.
Another breath of fresh air,
not only does this come with a full warranty,
but importantly it's not, how should I say this?
Scuffed by GameStop.
I'm not trying to throw shade on GameStop or anything
but while it might seem crazy to spend $300
on a new PS4, GameStop are selling these PS4s
for 250 bucks and while 50 bucks is 50 bucks,
having a brand new system that has not been abused,
doesn't have 10 year old thermal paste
or six year old thermal paste, it's not all gummed up.
I can see a little bit of an argument there
because I think when I went into this video
I saw that Sony still sold a PS4.
I'm like, "What? Why?"
When you consider that PS4s and especially PS4 Pros
have kept such good resale value,
it does kind of make sense
for Sony to do another run of these.
In fact, actually in the middle of making this video,
I was at Target and I actually saw
a few PS4s on the shelves, the only PlayStation
that I actually could buy in the store.
So clearly they're making these and people are buying them.
It's not just to plug the hole in PS5 sales
because they didn't have enough to hit store shelves.
The PS4 does actually have a real place.
Now, I'm not gonna tell you to buy one of these
because it's gonna be a great long-term play,
but if you're considering buying a PS4 now,
the prices have not plummeted like they did last generation.
In fact, it's almost the opposite.
These have hardly lost any value at all
in the seven years that the PS4 Slim is out.
Just think about that for a second.
Good?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
I can sit here and talk all day long about the software
and the hardware, but you buy a PlayStation to play games
and my biggest fear going into this video
was how well the 10 year old hardware would hold up
with modern games because it's easy to forget,
this is still supported by the vast majority of games
that are coming out into 2022 and into 2023.
Mind you, we'll see how that evolves
over the next year or two
and we'll talk about that in a minute.
But for games that you can play
and that are coming out right now,
the PS4 is still largely the console
that they are developing for and I'll tell you for sure
this base PS4 is holding up a lot better
than the Xbox One, which feels like it's just waiting
for someone to come and put it out of its misery.
The first game I played was "Warzone 2.0."
Now again, this is a game,
well technically "Modern Warfare,"
but this is a game that was included in the box.
So they're clearly trying to say that,
"Hey, this is a great experience,"
and it's a pretty good experience.
Now, "Warzone 2" definitely feels like it has been designed
with next generation consoles in mind
and I do think this is an area where the SSD
that I installed here
is making a little bit of a difference.
It is a massive open world,
it's like 150 players or something
and I would say the experience is generally pretty decent.
When it comes to image quality,
I think one of the things that really jumps out to me
is while obviously you're running at lower settings
and lower resolutions and that kind of stuff,
but the thing that is a little bit bothersome,
especially if you've played any of the newer consoles,
is how soft the image quality is.
It's clearly they're doing a lot of things
like temporal anti aliasing, which is trying to reconstruct
over multiple frames, sort of extra details
so that you can kind of mask that lower sort of pixel count
and I think it's largely successful.
It just has this sort of side effect of making everything
just look a little like vaseliney.
But if that's the trade off
between being able to play these games
and enjoy them on this older hardware,
for me, I don't think it's an unreasonable thing to do
'cause otherwise you can go full Nintendo Switch mode
and be playing at 480p
and it's gonna look like garbage.
All of these sort of post-processing effects,
especially in "Call of Duty" with like the motion blur
and the film grain and stuff, it's trying to dress up
an image which is a little bit subpar
and I think it does a fairly solid job and in fact,
I would actually say the performance is reasonable.
You're not getting a locked 60 FPS most of the time,
but it's also not like diving into the twenties.
Again, if you think back to the end
of the PS three generation,
those later games were not running well,
maybe the "Call of Duty's"
were a little bit better optimized
than a lot of other games.
But if you just think about from the context
of this is a 10 year old game console
and the fact that brand new games are coming out today
that are running pretty well,
I think it's an impressive feat
and it's even doubly so if you look
at some of the dedicated first party titles for PlayStation.
A game that has no issues pretty much whatsoever
is "Gran Turismo 7."
Now this is a game that I'm very familiar with
'cause I've been playing it on the PS5
since it came out last year.
So I know what this game looks like,
I know how it performs
and honestly, the PS4 is incredibly impressive.
Yes, you're losing a little bit of the fidelity
and yes, you're running at 1080p,
but the performance, rock solid,
very, very impressive
and the visuals honestly, not that big of a downgrade.
Certainly nowhere near as much as I thought.
Now sure, if you wanna go digital foundry on it,
you can definitely pixel peeps and little issues
here and there and it's certainly not going to be
the full experience of the world.
But as far as actually playing the game,
focusing on the gameplay and not the vistas
and the close up shots of the cars and everything,
honestly, you could probably fool me.
If I'm playing on 1080p display,
I probably wouldn't immediately be able
to pick out the PS5.
It is incredibly impressive this is running on base PS4.
People are gonna be really mad at me now.
They're like, "You can't tell the difference?
"What about the rate tracing?
"How am I supposed to deal with ambient occlusion?"
Another game which runs surprisingly well
on the base PS4 is "Fortnite."
Now, while it's a little bit of an older game,
Epic have done an absolutely incredible job
of constantly updating the game and, specifically,
recently it got an update to go to Unreal Engine 5
and I gotta say, it looks great.
Now, with a little caveat that, of course,
you're not getting all those features from the PS5,
you missed the global illumination
and some of the rate tracing features
and just some of the sheer like draw distance and whatnot
and yes, just like in "Warzone," there are some frame drops.
You're not sitting at a smooth locked 60 FPS,
but also just like "Warzone,"
you're getting 40, 50 a lot of time
and I will say that on the whole playing "Warzone"
and "Fortnite" back to back as they're broadly similar
kind of open world games, "Fortnite" runs better
and I would say "Fortnite" looks better.
It's clear that Epic have juiced absolutely
every single teraflop they can out of the PS4
at this point, which it's only 1.3 or 1.8,
but every single one of those flops are flopping hard.
Boy, I'm glad I'm not Digital Foundry.
Okay, so there's a lot of good,
honestly, a surprising amount of good.
I had very low expectations going in,
but then there's also some bad.
First and foremost, this is a 10 year old console this year.
Not the PS4 Slim specifically, but the base PS4 hardware
which is identical to this as far as performance.
It is old.
From this point forward, I think that they've sold
enough PS5s that, honestly, a lot of developers
are gonna be like, "I don't wanna have to deal
"with this PS4 anymore."
That's just a hunch.
Maybe this has another couple years
of great software support and I'll be very surprised.
But it does feel like with these DLCs
and with games starting to become more
and more exclusive to PS5, it does make sense
because while this is a remarkably competent device
considering it's made it 10 years, there is still
some major drawbacks compared to a modern console.
First and foremost is the CPU.
It is bad.
I was gonna use a different word, I'm gonna stick with bad.
This was a mobile eight core processor
that was literally the only thing AMMD had off the shelf
at the time when they were developing this
back in 2012, 2013.
The CPU is hilariously slow even by like the standards
of what you've got in your pocket for your phone.
While the GPU is decent, it lacks a lot of modern features.
It's like rate tracing and whatnot
and while I've upgraded this with an SSD,
again, a developer has to assume
that this is running a slow hard drive
which also severely impacts the size
and loading times of like open worlds and stuff.
It's clear the PS4 is starting to run
into the the inevitable march of time
and I think that gaming as a whole will be better
when everything can be targeted
like a PS5 and having an SSD and everything
and there's the price to consider.
Did I mention that this is $300 brand new?
Same price as it was when it came out in 2016.
It's also easy to forget that the PS4, literally,
is the only PlayStation ever,
besides I guess technically the PS one by default
because it was the first PlayStation,
that doesn't support any kind of wards compatibility
and yes, before you try to tell me the PS Now is great.
No, it's not.
It's not good.
It wasn't good when it first came out.
It's definitely not good today.
I don't wanna stream a bunch of PS3 games
that run like crap, that look like 720p
run through a Jello factory, that's not it.
The PS5 at least will play PS4 games, PS4 Pro games,
it'll take advantage of any kind of optimizations
the games have sort of developed
and you can't play PS1, PS2 games, anything like that,
which is arguably kind of one of the reasons
why I would actually say that you may
want to consider a PS3, especially an earlier PS3
that has full PS2 backwards compatibility.
If you want a single device that will give you a lot.
A PS3 plus a PS5 will play basically
every PlayStation game of all time.
Short of the Vita, I guess.
Boy, if only there was a next gen console
that was a readily available for $300
and sometimes 250 bucks and really, really rarely,
sometimes $230 that has all the wonderful features,
it's Xbox Series S, you should buy that.
I'm not even kidding.
I loved spending time with this PS4.
It is so much fun to go back
and it is surprising to see just how much works
but this Series S is better in almost every single way,
almost every single way.
Yes, it has a smaller SSD
so it's only got about 500 GB as opposed to one terabyte
and that does make a difference when games are huge
and unlike this, you can't easily upgrade that.
You pretty much have to buy one
of the very expensive Xbox sort of little memory sticks
which are like 200 bucks on their own.
So I get that.
But if you can be a little bit careful with your storage,
you are going to find it is a much better experience.
The Series S, while it can output 4K,
most games are largely targeted 1080p.
They're always, always gonna look better
than what you've got on the PS4 and importantly,
it feels like it's a better long-term play.
Games are gonna be coming out for the Xbox Series S
for years and years and years and years and years from now.
It is part of this current generation of gaming.
It's not going anywhere.
This PS4, the life cycle's not going
to be that much longer.
Even in that optimistic estimate of another year
or two of decent support,
that's not gonna even hold a candle
to where the Series S is gonna be in five, six, seven years,
which I still think it will be fully supported
at that point.
I gotta say, most people who are even remotely
considering buying this PS4 should just buy a PS5
or a Series S, that's the sad part of this video
because it's better than I expected,
but I expected it to be really bad
so that's not exactly a resounding recommendation.
I think that the PS4 deserves a long happy retirement
as a device that has great media controls,
that has a really nice software layer,
has tons and tons and tons of games that perform well.
You can even stream your PS5 on your PS4,
it just doesn't need to be $300.
Thank you very much for watching.
Make sure to subscribe if you enjoy this video
and let me know what console should I try
to resurrect from the dead next time.