The 10 Best Game Consoles for 2025

With the PlayStation and Xbox platforms offering similar graphics capabilities (at least on paper) at similar prices, the reasons to choose a PlayStation 5 Slim or PlayStation 5 Pro over an Xbox Series X or S revolve mostly around which games you want to play and how you want to play them.

Top pick

This version of the PS5 has a disc drive, so you can watch UHD Blu-ray movies, as well as play new or used PS5 and PS4 game discs. The rest of the features and hardware are the same.

If you have a big collection of physical PlayStation 4 games, if you want to watch 4K Blu-ray discs on your console, or if you’re a deal hunter looking for discounted new and used games on disc, you should get the standard Sony PlayStation 5 Slim so that you can use its UHD Blu-ray drive.

Best for…

The PS5 Slim Digital Edition doesn’t include a disc drive, so you can’t watch Blu-rays or take advantage of new or used games or old PS4 discs. But if you’re comfortable going all digital, it has the same graphics, CPU, memory, and storage hardware as the standard PS5.

The Sony PlayStation Slim 5 Digital Edition usually costs $50 less than the version with a UHD Blu-ray drive, and it does everything the standard version does aside from playing discs. If you don’t want to spend $500 on a new console, if you don’t buy or watch movies on UHD Blu-ray, or if you don’t care about disc-based games, the Digital Edition might make more sense, especially if you take advantage of a PlayStation Plus game subscription. You can always add a disc drive later — but it’ll cost you.

Upgrade pick

The PlayStation 5 Pro delivers the best performance of any PS5 model, but the visual benefits it provides might be hard to spot if you’re too far away from your TV. It also doesn’t come with a disc drive, despite a much higher price.

The PlayStation 5 Pro includes more powerful graphics hardware combined with new upscaling tech to deliver better performance, better visuals, or sometimes both, across many PS5 games, and it also comes with Wi-Fi 7 support and 2 TB of storage. But at $700, you’re paying a high premium for visual improvements you might not notice if you sit too far from your TV, or if the TV is smaller than 65 inches. And like the PS5 Slim Digital Edition, the PlayStation 5 Pro doesn’t come with a disc drive for physical games and media, though it supports the same add-on drive as the PS5 Slim Digital Edition does — or, if you’re upgrading from a standard PS5 Slim, you can pluck the drive off that and add it to the Pro.

But the most important factor to consider is which games you want to play. While PlayStation has expanded its PC-release strategy, its biggest games — like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Gran Turismo 7 — still debut on the PlayStation 5 first. Plus, the PS5 also plays virtually all of the PS4’s enormous library of games, and many of them run better on Sony’s newer hardware.

The two console platforms share some of the same major titles as well, including installments from franchises such as Call of Duty and Madden. Even after Microsoft purchased the makers behind major series like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom in the fall of 2020 and acquired the developers of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo, and more in 2023, the majority of games continue to be multiplatform. However, this has tipped things in Xbox’s favor when it comes to big games available in its subscription Game Pass offering, which in 2024 included Diablo IV and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. And this summer Helldivers 2, PlayStation’s biggest exclusive release of the past several years, arrived on Xbox Series consoles.

While some games still lock you into playing games with other players on the same platform, cross-platform multiplayer allowing interaction among players on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC is now fairly common, so this is less of a concern than it has been in the past. Both the PlayStation and Xbox platforms require subscriptions for access to even basic online functions. For PlayStation, this subscription is called PlayStation Plus; for Xbox, it’s called Xbox Game Pass Core.

The PS Plus subscription service has three tiers of membership: PlayStation Plus Essential, Extra, and Premium. The baseline subscription, PS Plus Essential, costs $80 per year; the annual prices rise to $135 and $160, respectively, for Extra and Premium. Members of any tier gain access to online play, special discounts on some titles during sales, and two free games a month (of varying quality). You keep the free games as long as you have a PS Plus subscription, but you lose access to them if you cancel, even if you’ve already downloaded them. Those who subscribe to the more expensive PS Plus tiers, Extra and Premium, gain access to additional game catalogs.

You do not have to pay for PS Plus to use streaming video services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. You don’t need PS Plus to use the PlayStation 5’s party voice-chat system to voice-chat with friends (Xbox doesn’t have this restriction, either).

The PS5 has its own native VR headset, called the PlayStation VR2. It’s a great device that’s comfortable to wear and easy to set up, but most people shouldn’t buy it because most of the games you can play on the PS VR2 are also playable elsewhere, including on cheaper all-in-one headsets like the Meta Quest 3S.

The PS5 and the Xbox Series X are similarly competent media centers for a living room. Both output 4K video and have Blu-ray UHD disc drives, so you can watch digital movies or discs that you already own. The PS5 does not support Dolby Vision or or DTS:X, though — if you don’t know what those things are, don’t worry about it, but if you want to take advantage of either standard, the Xbox may be a better choice. If you’re considering either of the cheaper versions, the $400 PS5 Slim Digital Edition or the $300 Xbox Series S, you’ll have to be comfortable with giving up a disc drive completely. Those models still support 4K video, but you’ll have to stream or own digital films.

If you’re ready for a PlayStation 5, there’s one last thing to keep in mind: its size. The PS5 is a huge console — yes, even the current, revised “slim” model — and it can’t fit well in a lot of media centers, vertically or horizontally. If you really want a PlayStation, we don’t think its size is a reason to skip it. But measure your space to make sure you know where it will fit.