PlayStation 6 is coming and it’s not coming cheaply. Sony is making “solid progress in preparing for the next-generation platform,” the company said last week, but its next-gen device is also reportedly likely to cost over $1,000. Ex–PlayStation executive Shawn Layden would prefer the PS6 innovate on price rather than power.
“I think we have enough power in the machine,” the former chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios told The Trophy Room in a recent interview. “The innovation needs to come not from making PS6 for $1,200—it’s to make another PS5 for $300. Now, that would be true innovation.”
Layden has been a critic of the console war arms race in recent years, arguing that improvements have become increasingly hard to spot with the naked eye while sitting in anything less than pristine viewing conditions. The price tags for these improvements have also skyrocketed. Not only has the price of the PS5 actually gone up during its life cycle, the budgets for triple-A studios have exploded even as sales stay flat or go down, leading to a crisis among big publishers.
“I mean, the the jump from PS1 to PS2 was incredible, right?” he said. “And the jump from compact disc to DVD, different storage medium, higher density, and then from two to three when you got to 1080p and you can really do 60 frames per second at uh, you know, at a high frame rate. And then PS4, which was like, [it] completely worked and all that was done and and you still got it for $399. And then PS5, we’re talking about ray tracing and teraflops. And the talk about PS6 is even more ray tracing and more teraflops. These are the differences only dogs can hear.”
These trends are also coming to a head at a time when AI hyperscalers are consuming RAM at an unprecedented clip, spiking the prices for other hardware manufacturers at an unsustainable pace. Some companies predict the prices will only continue to go up through 2028, meaning the next generation of consoles could be the least affordable and the least impressive relative to the sorts of performance leaps fans have been trained to expect from a new batch of hardware.
Then you look at the Switch 2 and Steam and realize that millions of gamers are content just to play great games, regardless of whether they are graphical showcases or not. Lots of us just spent the weekend playing the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. I had plenty of thoughts strolling down memory lane but “I wish this looked better” definitely wasn’t one of them.