The death of consoles has been predicted with atomic clock levels of regularity for at least the past quarter century. Each new wave of consumer hardware with the capacity – real or hypothetical – to play games has been heralded as the final nail in the coffin. Some of those, like home PCs and smartphones, found healthy, thriving places in the gaming ecosystem. Others, like smart TVs, ended up being sideshows at most – but through it all, consoles have kept on trucking, with revenues continuing to climb even if there’s been a concerning stagnation in the overall audience size for quite some time.
Consequently, I have no intention of making a “this time, consoles are definitely really doomed” argument. The core idea of them, a dedicated device that’s solely designed to play good-quality games with a minimum of technical fuss, is extremely appealing to a large market segment in a way that nothing has ever managed to supplant. It’s telling that both Valve and Microsoft see the potential growth path for PC gaming in blurring the line between PC and console by adopting major parts of the console experience.
What is apparent, however, is that the next generation shift in the console market is going to demand a significant evolution, not just in terms of hardware and performance but in terms of the overall strategy of the console platforms.
An asking price of over $1,000 can only be justified by hardware that’s a massive, exciting departure from the current gen systems
The component pricing crisis means that next-gen systems which follow the same upgrade strategy as in previous generations will cost north of $1000 – more than doubling the launch price of the current generation. That’s a challenging value proposition, one that can truly only be justified by hardware that’s a massive, exciting departure from the current gen systems.
Microsoft has dropped broad hints in the past couple of months about reconsidering its strategy with Project Helix in light of the new pricing challenges. We know even less about the PlayStation 6 or what Sony’s original vision for the system may have been, but it seems safe to assume that those plans, too, have not survived the RAMageddon crisis intact.
One option for the company might have been to push back the PS6 launch for a year or two, eking a longer lifespan out of the PS5 and hoping that component prices come back down to earth over time. That would be a calculated gamble – it could work out, though the downside risk would see the company ending up stewarding an aging platform that’s lost its market inertia but still facing sky-high component prices nonetheless.
This week, however, we saw a pretty strong hint that Sony actually intends to stick to its original timeline – not that it’s ever announced a timeline for PS6, but a late 2027 launch was broadly what everyone expected. The company’s terse announcement that it will stop selling games on physical discs from January 2028 has received a lot of attention, almost all of it negative, but the specific date chosen for the deadline is also interesting. If we assume that PS6 will be entirely a digital-only console – a pretty safe assumption given this announcement – then ceasing disc production from January 2028 would fit nicely with a timeline in which PS6 launches in late 2027, making winter 2027 into the handover season in which both consoles are promoted side-by-side, with PS5 getting its last major first-party releases.
This week was a strong hint that Sony intends to stick to a late 2027 launch for PS6
Assuming that’s the case, it does essentially mean that Sony’s first announcement of anything even vaguely PS6-related has essentially been “no discs, suck it up losers”, which feels rather like the console equivalent of a botched gender reveal party that sets a nearby forest on fire – but it at least gives us the broad outlines of a timeline.
There’s some far less official information out there, too, including a recent post from a leaker claiming insider knowledge of hardware planning, who suggested that the PS6’s bill of materials – the basic cost of the components that will go into the console – has shot up $200 in just a few months, and is now hovering north of $950. Whether it’s real insider information or not, it’s entirely credible in light of the price hikes we’ve seen across the industry in recent months.
So there’s the broad shape of the dilemma. Signs are pointing to Sony sticking to its late 2027 timeline; but the state of the hardware industry is suggesting that a PS6 launching in that timeframe will cost at least $1000. That price point would be a hard sell at any time, but this is arguably a tougher situation than most, because there’s no obvious technological step up that PS6 can take advantage of as its major selling point. The past few generations have benefitted enormously from having a key technology that made them markedly different to their predecessor – for the PS5 it was the fast SSD, while support for HD and then 4K resolutions were also major reasons to upgrade hardware at previous transitions.
PS6 hardware can undoubtedly offer a major bump in graphical performance, of course, but diminishing returns on graphical fidelity updates have kicked in hard in recent years. While the PS5 will be seven years old at that point, it will be hard to convince even fairly devoted consumers to upgrade quickly if all that involves is swapping one box under the TV for another and spending $1000+ to buy some more raytracing and better FSR upscaling.
So what might a PS6 that can get the market interested enough to overlook (or at least tolerate) its huge price point actually look like? I don’t claim to have any inside line here, but logically speaking, Sony must be thinking hard about how to clearly and dramatically delineate the PS6 from its predecessor – making it not so much into an incremental upgrade (a hard sell at $1000), but a brand new, exciting, must-have gaming platform.
There are a few things – circumstantial though they may be – which suggest that a new form factor might be part of Sony’s solution to that problem. Making such a clean break from physical media, and making a point of announcing it 18 months in advance, could hint at the new system not just lacking a disc drive by default (like the PS5 Pro already does), but actually not being suitable for attaching a drive to at all – a digital-only console by necessity as much as desire.
Rather than trying to launch both a home console and a handheld in this disastrously expensive market, Sony’s handheld ambition might actually be one and the same as its PS6 planning
That would make particular sense if PS6 is a move towards some kind of handheld, semi-portable form factor. There has been persistent industry chatter for a couple of years about Sony having a renewed interest in the handheld space, with the PS Portal seen as an experimental toe in the water that heralds a more significant move back into that market. We might reasonably speculate that rather than trying to launch both a home console and a handheld in this disastrously expensive market, Sony’s handheld ambition might actually be one and the same as its PS6 planning.
That could also help to solve another hardware-related problem that’s been an open question about PS6 – assuming it follows the expected evolutionary upgrade path, just how huge would this thing be? The PS5 is already a beast of a machine. Sony did a good job of making it run reasonably quietly thanks to a very large fan and cooling system that prevents it from sounding like a busy day on Heathrow’s runways like the PS4 did. The consequence, though, is that the system itself is about as big as a piece of consumer hardware like this can realistically get. Anything larger would be a very tough sell to a lot of households (PS5s already tend to end up awkwardly positioned in living rooms due to not fitting properly under the TV). While chipsets have become more efficient in the intervening years, by and large the scaling laws are unforgiving; you want more teraflops, you need more watts and more cubic centimetres for cooling. High-end PC graphics cards alone occupy about half the volume of a modern console.
Shifting the form factor of PS6 to encompass some kind of portable functionality might offer a solution to this problem as well. It would essentially move the key selling point of the system away from top-end performance and towards functionality, opening up breathing room from Sony and its chip partner AMD to explore more efficient chipsets with lower power consumption and less aggressive cooling needs. That approach would also maximise the benefit of the collaboration between Sony and AMD on developing FSR upscaling technology, which could help to smooth over the smaller than usual performance bump that would result from such a decision.
Again, I have absolutely no insider information to offer here – but as we inch closer to the point where Sony will presumably start sharing some hard information about its new system, the question of what that system actually needs to look like in order to sell a cash-strapped public on a $1000 upgrade is hard to dismiss. For the first time in PlayStation’s history, market conditions far out of Sony’s hands may dictate that “it’s like the previous PlayStation, but with upgrades” may not be a pitch that works for enough of the potential audience. I don’t doubt that there can and will be a thriving console market in the next generation of hardware – but I’m increasingly unconvinced that the devices that actually succeed in that market will look very much like the current gen of home consoles.
