Spring 2026. Sony has quietly but clearly announced: starting April 2026, PS4 support will begin to fade away. Patches, servers, updates, even parts of the digital store; everything will gradually shut down until the console becomes just a piece of plastic with discs that still spin.

And here’s where it gets interesting: you might think this is just news about some old hardware. It’s not. Most people reading this right now feel a strange tightness in their chest. Not because “oh no, I won’t get the next GTA Online update,” but because an entire chunk of their life is dying.

This isn’t about the console. It’s about the version of you from ten years ago.

Psychologists refer to this as associative autobiographical memory. In simple terms: the brain doesn’t store memories in a vacuum. It ties them to smells, songs, places… and things. Your PS4 isn’t just a gaming machine. It is a physical key to a specific era of your life:

• It is you coming home from school or work and firing up Bloodborne because someone called you weird again that day;
• It is your first love sitting next to you on the couch, both of you crying at the end of The Last of Us Part II;
• It is friends you haven’t seen in years but still stayed up until 4 a.m. with, playing FIFA or Warzone;
• It is that time when you were broke as hell but bought a PS4 on credit and felt like a king for a month.

When the console officially “dies,” the brain treats it like another brick in the wall that separates you from who you used to be. It’s the same feeling you get when you drive past your old school that’s been demolished, or when you finally delete that 2014 playlist. Only this time it’s stronger, because the PS4 wasn’t background noise; it was an active participant in those years.

The research backs it up

Research in consumer psychology has increasingly shown that people form profound emotional attachments to “digital artifacts” (games, save files, profiles), often rivaling our connection to physical objects. Why? Because you didn’t just own the thing; you lived thousands of hours inside it. Your Skyrim character, your Minecraft base, your 3000-hour Destiny account; those are extensions of your personality.

When the servers go dark, it literally feels like losing a piece of yourself. Psychologists Russell Belk and others call this the “Extended Self.” You feel the loss like a phantom limb.

The “last night on Earth” effect

There’s another psychological phenomenon kicking in right now: when we know the exact date something ends, we suddenly value it more than ever. This is known as Anticipatory Nostalgia.

People who haven’t turned on their PS4 in years are dragging it out from under the bed. Booting up old GTA V. Texting old friends: “Bro, one last Rocket League session before it dies?” We are subconsciously treating the present moment as the most important one because we desperately want to say goodbye properly.

What to do with the pain

Let yourself grieve. Seriously. It’s not “just a console.” It’s okay to feel sad. Suppressing these “small” losses just piles up into one big emptiness later.

Create a goodbye ritual. Gather the squad for one final PS4 LAN party. Record a video of you all playing your favorite game. Screenshot every save file. Rituals help the brain close the loop.

Carry pieces of yourself forward. Yeah, the PS5 isn’t the same. But transferring your digital library and playing old games via backward compatibility is like moving out of an old apartment; you take the photos and the favorite couch with you, even if the walls are different.

Understand this: you’re not losing the memories. They live in you. The console was just the trigger. Ten years from now you’ll still smile remembering staying up all night with Uncharted 4, even if the disc has long been landfill.

The PS4 didn’t just sell 117+ million units. It became home for an entire generation. And when the last official server finally goes dark in spring 2026, we won’t just be losing a console. We’ll be losing the last living link to who we were in the 2013–2020s.

But you know what? That’s okay. That’s how it’s supposed to be. One day we’ll all power down like old consoles.

The only thing that matters is that we leave behind saves that can never be deleted.

The ones inside us.

References

• Extended Self (Digital Possessions): Based on the work of Russell Belk (1988/2013), describing how external objects (and now digital assets) become viewed as part of the self-definition. Loss of these objects is processed psychologically as a loss of self.
• Anticipatory Nostalgia: The psychological experience of missing the present or the immediate future before it has actually passed, often triggered by the knowledge of an impending ending (Batcho, 2013).
• Associative Memory (Proustian Memory): Referring to involuntary autobiographical memories triggered by sensory cues or specific objects (Berntsen, 1996).