Better late than never, right?
In the world of dedicated videogame consoles, 2023 felt in many ways like the true dawn of a new generation; in hindsight the pandemic-punctuated pageantry of 2020’s eleventh hour now kinda reads like a pillow-soft launch with only trivia night technicality in mind. It may have been a rollercoaster of a year for PC gaming – an astonishing density of poor ports sprinkled among a fleet of immensely exciting pushes into the handheld space – but the console world brought some semblance of confident, comforting familiarity to 2023. The slow transition from the last generation is finally approaching its end with real intent – bringing a controversial return to normalcy for 30 FPS visuals along with it as Unreal Engine 5 leads the way down a road the last generation cannot travel.
But we can still fill out a top five for now, so let’s do that.
My ranking is based on new developments in each console’s wheelhouse, primarily concerning exclusive games but also taking in factors like firmware updates and hardware/accessory additions. As always, mostly due to how wide and varied their ecosystems are, Mobile and PC are disregarded for this list.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. Playstation 4
LAST YEAR: 4th
‘Twas the year the fourth Playstation home console effectively began its last march into the pages of history. Though plenty of major circumstances were out of Sony’s control this time, the company’s famous decade-long support plan for its numbered videogame machines has perhaps been a little easier to uphold in the case of the PS4 than its two older brothers: neither the PS2 nor the PS3 enjoyed quite this many of their allocated ten years as a lead platform for brand-new prestige videogame releases. Yet here we are at the end of 2023, and Sony’s lean exclusives lineup for the year has effectively skipped the fourth home Playstation. A couple of bigger third-party games have followed suit – although back-ports for the likes of Hogwarts Legacy and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor proved that the very biggest are still unable to resist the allure of that ocean of existing last-gen machines.
4. Xbox One
LAST YEAR: 5th
A pretty similar situation to the PS4 here, except the Xbox One console family did receive the same home screen UI update that the newer Series consoles got, so it’s kind of ahead by default. Furthermore, the comparison between the Game Pass and PS+ Extra offerings continues to favour the Xbox side by some margin, but when you filter down the comparison to just day-one indie titles – which invariably have no problem running on last-gen tech – the head-to-head picture becomes even rosier for the ol’ Xbone. With a game pass subscription and a cheap second-hand Xbox in 2023, you could enjoy the likes of Cocoon, Cassette Beasts, Bramble: The Mountain King, Sea of Stars, Thirsty Suitors, Fuga: Memories of Steel 2, Steamworld Build, Party Animals, Venba, The Last Case of Benedict Fox, Planet of Lana, and Roboquest – and the last three are currently unavailable on a Sony or Nintendo platform. Not bad at all.
3. Xbox Series X|S
LAST YEAR: 3rd
This was the most enjoyable year to follow and discuss Xbox news I’ve ever experienced – for better and worse.
Sure, Redfall was one of the most spectacular high-profile exclusive videogame failures of the social media age; but the internet (and this list) has a history of forgiving quickly if the hits show up in numbers – and 2023 also gave the Xbox Series Hi-Fi Rush, Starfield and the reinvented Forza Motorsport alongside the indie exclusives mentioned in the previous entry. Couple that with major day-one Game Pass releases like Lies of P, Persona 5 Tactica, Like a Dragon Gaiden, Payday 3, the typically odd categorisation nightmare of Minecraft Legends, and current-gen-only indies like Teardown and Jusant, then keep the industry-leading custom gamepad party going with another flurry of cool colours topped by maybe Xbox’s best special edition controller ever, then finally top with a nice little mid-year UI update integrating the Game Pass app into the home screen and cutting down button presses to get anywhere; now you have a year that just misses out on second spot by a hair.
2. Playstation 5
LAST YEAR: 1st
It’s just as well that my PS5 only fits behind my television, because I barely used the thing for the entirety of 2023’s first half – only the megaton Final Fantasy XVI at the end of June compelled me to lay hands on a Dualsense once again. While the second half of the year demanded a bit more attention, with Spider-Man 2 and the crucial early release (for consoles anyway) of Baldur’s Gate III flying quite the compelling flag – the latter did hit Xbox before year’s end so I can’t quite count it fully. Aside from the Horizon: Forbidden West expansion Burning Shores – which did not release on the PS4 – that was just about all she wrote for strong exclusives on the PS5 after a heavy-hitting 2022.
But the PS5 also happened to enjoy a tremendous year for hardware, releasing enough dedicated accessories throughout to make even Nintendo blush; it is this factor that lifts the PS5 just above Xbox in 2023 for me (look at early next year – they aren’t even done!) Asterisks are plentiful in that discussion, of course: the Playstation VR 2 is a mightily impressive jump in quality over the 2016 model, but the dedicated game support has been sparse at best thus far; the Dualsense Edge is at long last a worthy answer to the Xbox Elite controller, but it’s eye-wateringly expensive even by industry standards; the Pulse Explore earbuds leverage the audio tech side of Sony for great sound, but fall short in almost every other area according to early reviews; the Playstation Portal may be exactly what I want for my portable-leaning lifestyle, but it packs a titanic laundry list of restrictions and isn’t even available in Australia until next year.
We do traditionally love a console refresh on this list, even if it turns out the half-hearted “PS5 Slim” announcement trailer was as hilariously short as the model deserved, providing limited incentive for current console owners to move over unless you have the digital-only launch model – although its implications for efficient production are definitely cool. Lastly, the Playstation Access controller is pretty much all positive for the PS ecosystem, and a legitimate step up over Xbox’s already impressive alternative. 2023 also brought out an absolutely gorgeous deep blue controller shade alongside a cool software update that added haptic feedback to menu navigation, and I love that kind of thing. It truly was mighty close, but second place goes to the blue guys this year.
1. Nintendo Switch
LAST YEAR: 2nd
As sure as death, taxes and Call of Duty releases, the Switch has now completed a clean sweep of every odd-numbered year as Nintendo’s main console, and it has done so with arguably its best yearlong highlight reel since launch. A gargantuan, headline-sweeping new Zelda, a remarkable return to glory for 2D Mario, and the Pikmin title the series has always deserved were the lightning rods around which some of Nintendo’s best-ever DLC offerings gathered, joined by a couple of fabulous fan-forward remakes (one of them a double-pack) and a new bar for meticulous remasters delivered in Samus Aran’s armour.
There were also new entries in the WarioWare and Fire Emblem series that focused on long-abandoned but beloved gameplay elements, a whimsical left-field Bayonetta prequel far better than it had any right to be, and a shrewd revival for the F-Zero series that will hopefully signal more love in the future. No less than four special edition Switches were released to the wild, and Joy-Con colour pairs left the neon behind to embrace pastel palettes. The long-dormant Dragon Quest Monsters series and the deranged Danganronpa development team landed on Switch this year with exclusive releases, as did a Disney-backed four-player platformer that may have signalled the start of a new golden era for that genre. Perhaps most shockingly, EA finally made a football game for the Switch that wasn’t just the exact same thing as the first Switch football game six years ago. That’s when you know you’ve made it.
And then there was that beautiful release cadence, which almost seemed like it was designed by people who actually wanted some time to play the big games as they came out! Though not all of these are exclusives, Fire Emblem Engage into Octopath Traveller II into Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster into Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp into Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed into Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom into Master Detective Archives: Rain Code into Pikmin 4 may just be the best run of (mostly) evenly-spaced videogame releases aimed squarely at me that I have experienced on a console in the entirety of my life – and that’s ignoring the Game Boy Colour/Advance titles sprinkled between them that leveraged the Switch’s much-improved NSO emulation to take precious time away from everything else. Despite the much newer tech toys surrounding me, I spent most of 2023 drawn repeatedly back to the Switch, and finished the year with more logged hours than any other – 2017 included.
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Honorable Mentions
We’re still waiting for some. Next year, perhaps…
Vagrant Rant 