How to Start Trophy Hunting on PlayStation: A Complete Beginner's Guide

Trophy hunting is the practice of deliberately completing a game's trophy list rather than collecting whatever happens to fall out of a normal playthrough. It costs nothing to start, it works on every PlayStation console from PS3 onward, and the main thing standing between a beginner and their first platinum is knowing three or four rules that nobody writes down.

The four trophy types

Every PlayStation game has a trophy list built from the same four pieces:

• Bronze — routine progress. Finish a chapter, use a mechanic, find a few collectibles.
• Silver — a meaningful step. A substantial optional objective or a mid-sized grind.
• Gold — a major milestone. Finish the game, complete every side mission, clear a hard difficulty.
• Platinum — awarded automatically for earning every other trophy in the base list.

That last point is the one to internalise. You never work on the platinum directly. It falls out the moment the list underneath it is complete, and it is the only trophy that behaves this way.

Not every game has a platinum. Smaller titles frequently ship a list of bronzes and silvers with nothing on top.

DLC does not count toward the platinum

If a game adds trophies through downloadable content, those trophies sit outside the base list. You can platinum a game while ignoring every DLC trophy it has.

DLC trophies still award XP toward your level — they just have no bearing on whether the platinum unlocks. Beginners routinely buy an expansion believing it is required. It is not.

Choosing your first platinum

The advice you will hear most often is to pick something short and easy. It is not bad advice, but it produces a lot of people who platinum a five-minute shovelware title and never come back, because the process felt like nothing.

A better filter, in order:

1. Pick a game you would happily play twice. Most platinums involve at least some replay — a second difficulty, a missed collectible run, a different ending. If the prospect of a second lap sounds like a chore before you start, choose something else.

2. Check the completion time honestly. Trophy guides publish estimated hours to platinum. Take the top of the range, not the bottom; the low estimate assumes you never get stuck.

3. Check for online trophies. Anything requiring multiplayer is a risk. Servers close, populations dry up, and a game with a dead online mode has an unobtainable platinum no matter how good you are.

4. Check for difficulty trophies. "Complete on the hardest difficulty" is fine if the game is fair. In some games it means twenty hours of frustration you did not sign up for.

5. Check for a single-playthrough path. Many games can be fully completed in one run if you know what to do. Those are far kinder first platinums than games demanding three separate playthroughs.

Our trophy guides list difficulty, estimated hours, playthrough count, and whether anything is missable, for exactly this triage.

The three mistakes that cost beginners a playthrough

Missable trophies

A missable trophy can become permanently unobtainable in your current save — you passed the point where it was possible and the game will not let you back. Some games handle this gracefully with chapter select. Many do not, and the only fix is starting over.

Read the missable section of a guide before you start, not when you are stuck. It is five minutes of reading against a potential twenty-hour replay.

Difficulty settings that disable trophies

Plenty of games disable trophies entirely on their easiest setting, or lock certain trophies to higher difficulties. Some let you lower difficulty mid-game but permanently void the trophy for the higher one. Confirm the rules before you touch that menu — this is one of the most common ways a run is quietly ruined.

Trophies that do not stack the way you assume

Beginners often expect completing hard mode to award the easy and normal trophies too. Sometimes it does. Frequently it does not, and finding out afterwards means three playthroughs instead of one.

Track your progress from the start

Trophy hunting is a long-term hobby and it is far more motivating when you can see the shape of it. Your console shows raw numbers; a tracker shows trajectory — completion percentage, rarest trophies, level progress, how you compare to other hunters.

Set up a psn.gg profile, and you can watch your level climb and your platinum count against the wider community. Seeing a completion percentage move is a surprisingly effective reason to go back and finish the two trophies you abandoned.

A word on legitimacy

Trophy hunting has a cheating problem, and it is worth understanding before you start rather than after.

Modified saves, unlock tools, and hacked consoles can produce trophies that were never earned — and they leave fingerprints. Trophies unlocked in an impossible order, or timestamps showing a fifty-hour platinum completed in ninety seconds, are trivially detectable. psn.gg scans profiles for exactly these signatures and flags them, and other trophy communities do the same. Sony has removed illegitimate trophies from accounts.

The practical advice: if you use a modded console or a save editor for anything, keep it away from an account you care about. A flagged profile is permanent in a way a bad playthrough never is.

Frequently asked questions

Do trophies transfer between PS4 and PS5?

Your trophies are tied to your PSN account, so they follow you to any console you sign into. What does not transfer is progress between versions — the PS4 and PS5 releases of a game usually have separate lists, and earning one does not fill in the other.

Can I hide my trophies?

You can set your trophy visibility through your PlayStation privacy settings, which controls who sees your list. There is no way to hide a single game while showing the rest.

What happens if I delete a game?

Nothing happens to earned trophies — they are stored on your account. Make sure they have synced first. See our guide on what you can and cannot delete.

Is there any reward for trophies beyond the number?

Not from Sony directly, beyond profile display and level. The reward is the collection itself, plus whatever standing you build in communities that track it — which is precisely why the leaderboards exist.

How many trophies does a platinum need?

There is no fixed count. Lists range from around a dozen trophies to well over a hundred. A typical full-price release lands somewhere between 40 and 60.