Dealmaster: The best Black Friday gaming deals for PS4, Switch, and Xbox

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The Nintendo Switch.
Enlarge / The Nintendo Switch.
Photo Illustration by Guillaume Payen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Today is Black Friday, and that means a lot of video game deals. While the annual shopping event is still filled with offers that push mediocre products or prices that aren’t particularly low, many of the gaming deals the Dealmaster has found across various retailers are genuinely worth your time.

On the PlayStation side of things, that includes $100 off the 4K-ready PlayStation 4 Pro, with the standalone console and a bundle that includes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare currently down to $299. The standard “Slim” PS4, meanwhile, is down to $199; that’s about $80-100 off where we normally see it online, but Sony is packaging God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition, and The Last of Us: Remastered with the console as part of its holiday season bundle. For context, those three games usually sit in the $10-20 range these days. (All of them are also pretty good, if you haven’t tried them already.) This deal does appear to be running out of stock pretty quickly, though.

A bundle of the company’s PlayStation VR headset that includes two games and two PlayStation Move motion controllers is also discounted to $250. That’s roughly a $100 discount and about as low as we see it at major retailers. An additional bundle that included five games but no Move controllers was available for $200 earlier this week, but that unfortunately looks to be out of stock at major retailers on Black Friday itself.

For Xbox enthusiasts, Microsoft has bundles of its 4K-capable console, the Xbox One X, for $350. The console comes paired with a month of Xbox Live Gold, a month of Xbox Game Pass, and either the entire mainline Gears of War series, including Gears 5 (which we liked), the Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (which we didn’t), or NBA 2K20 (which is still NBA 2K). If you don’t need the beefier specs of the One X, the lesser-powered Xbox One S—which is still capable of playing 4K video—is down to $199, another $100 discount. It has the same bundle options mentioned above. Amazon briefly ran deals that dropped these consoles by another $40 a piece earlier in the day, but those have since sold out.

Finally, if you’re all-in on Xbox Game Pass and can live with no disc drive whatsoever, the All-Digital Edition of the One S is on sale for $150. It’s virtually the same console as the One S, but obviously relying strictly on digital downloads for everyone. If nothing else, the sale does temporarily address the biggest gripe we’ve had with the console’s existence.

To be clear, this is a bit of an odd time for most people to buy a new PlayStation or Xbox, what with both companies openly talking about their plans to release follow-ups to these consoles next year. We can’t speak for everyone, but even if you are holding out for a PS5 or next Xbox, there are some decent deals on each consoles’ respective controllers, subscription services, and other accessories.

PS4 and Xbox One controllers are back down to their typical sale price of $40, for instance, while a three-month pass of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is $20 off. Sony is selling a year of PlayStation Plus for $45 as well—that’s not a bad deal, but it’s worth noting that we’ve seen it go for $5 less at various points over the past year.

Deals for the one major console that won’t be replaced in the next 12 months, the Nintendo Switch, aren’t as plentiful. The best offer here is at Amazon, which is including $25 of store credit with the purchase of the console at its usual $300. (Click “redeem” by the “Extra Savings” bit to see the credit at checkout.) The retailer says it’ll apply the credit to your account within a week of purchasing, but note that it’ll only be good for 60 days and will only apply to products sold by Amazon itself on the site, not third-party retailers. (Update 5:15pm ET: Amazon’s Switch deal now appears to have sold out.)

Nintendo’s primary bundle elsewhere pairs the console with a digital copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but it only applies to the original Switch model from 2017, not the revised edition included in the Amazon deal that significantly improves the device’s battery life. Mario Kart is still a fun little game that goes for about $40-45 on its own, and it’s not like the older Switch is a bad piece of hardware. Still, we think it’s worth buying the latest model if you have no interest in the bundled game. We haven’t seen any deals on the smaller Switch Lite from major retailers, either, though you can take about $10 off a set of Joy-Con controllers if needed.

Regardless of which console or platform you play on, there are a ton of deals on the games themselves. Some of the bigger-name highlights include God of War for $10, Marvel’s Spider-Man for $15, Control for $25, several first-party Switch games for $40, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for $38, but there’s a truckload more beyond that. We’ve done our best to curate a list of worthwhile offers below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

PlayStation 4 deals

Xbox One deals

Nintendo Switch deals

Video game deals

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