Reading this heading immediately following ‘Sony and Bandai Namco announce generative AI collaboration to find how the tech can “effectively contribute to realising a creator’s vision”’ must be one of the most unintentionally funny moments of my week.
Like any tech industry hype cycle, it requires them talking out of both sides of their ass, because AI is the only thing investors and stakeholders will pay any attention to. So even if they have to cannibalize their core business to feed the AI frenzy, that’s just a Pavlovian response at this point.
Allbirds was an extreme example, but basically every company is Allbirds to some degree at this point. It’s a mass psychosis.
They could also probably just wait. Seeing as there are still PS4 games coming out.
Their next announcement: “with our new pay-as-you-go GPU Server pricing model, you’ll never have to overpay for hardware you’re not using!”
I mean, they do that already. You can visibly see how popular PS+ Cloud is. I don’t have exact numbers, but I can see that they don’t do much to advertise it anymore, and that the whole industry saw Stadia and Luna fail.
AHHHHHHHH!!! 😵
Good luck selling any console after PS5, especially since “changing business models” undoubtedly means further enshittification. Unjailbroken consoles have always been for suckers, but now it’s getting really obvious.
As a player, I don’t feel like I need PS6. The current generation of consoles is good enough, at least for now.
Yeah, hell a ton of the games on my wishlist are indie games and are even on the PS4/Switch. With diminishing returns whatever next gen consoles we get are competing with their predecessors in ways that have never been true before. I’d be shocked if I actually wanted to replace my PS5 before 2030. I may not need to until the PS7 hits, if it ever does.
On one hand, consoles suck compared to PC. On the other hand, fuck these shitty “AI” companies and all the damage they’ve done to the environment, art, computing, and the accuracy of information.
Change business models scares me. It sounds like the first steps towards exactly what the entire industry wants to become. No more hardware, just streaming devices where they own everything with the excuse of shortage manipulation. Good luck if it comes to that, it’s the first time I will say goodbye Sony since growing up with them from the beginning PS1 era.
Early 2000s i had everything, xbox, gamecube, ps2 and everything prior. Since then i only went with Sony getting a PS3, and PS4. No wii or wiiu or any xbox since the original. I did get a switch a few years after release, which was great as well, but idk about the switch 2 either. At this point its been PS5 and a gaming PC which I was lucky enough to build only a few years ago when prices came down for a short time and hope it lasts about 10 years. This will have to get me buy for the foreseeable future, and just hope the hardware doesnt fail first.
I’m terrified of the “rent compute” future we’re heading towards.
The future business model will be “we’ll just keep selling people the same old shit because there’s no competition”.
Just wait another 5, 10 years. Honestly. Games are crisp as fuck and devs are barely scratching modern hardware.
They should just post-pone the PS6.
Back around the PS4, I posited theories that we’d hit the “graphical plateau”, and while it was technically possible to make a stronger console, the returns were not great. I was wrong, and we got the PS5, but I don’t think I was wrong by much. It’s nicer to have 60fps and 1080p more reliably, but there’s really nothing urgent going past that - and if I understand right, there’s still a pretty large install base of PS4 users. It even runs some of the latest - did anyone notice games like LEGO Batman: LotDK and Jedi: Survivor somehow run on there?
I think there’s still plenty of ways to pull people’s interests, but it’s not going to be by the same big E3 reveal of some graphical leap. Not like we have E3 anymore anyway.
(I will admit this is a very anti-consumer move, but honestly, the most logical long-term strategy I could see them going for is returning to making large console-exclusive games)
Maybe the PS6 (and next Xbox) will be a $100 streaming box, and the games will be run on their servers, and you’ll pay a monthly fee to access the games, which gives you a break on the cost of the game, which you won’t own, you’ll just borrow a license to it.
And you’ll like it. /s
But really, on one hand it kinda sidesteps the issue of RAM/storage cost, but it’s also kinda shitty. It also begs the question of, why do I need their box at all? I should be able to pay for their streaming service and run that on my MacBook Air. I mean if they’re doing the heavy lifting, why do I need to buy their branded box at all? And PlayStation does not like to play well with others.
It also rules out all the customers who have shitty internet.
Which is fewer and fewer all the time. Internet to the last mile has been a thing for like, I dunno, 20-30 years or something. A lot of rural areas in the US have gigabit fiber and many have two or three options for 100Mbit or better.
And outside the US it’s usually better
As long as they can get enough, they’ll make money. I mean Netflix and other streaming services rule out people with slow Internet and they’re not struggling. It’s been a moot point for years.
I think the greater concern is if you can be kicked off the Net or excluded from it.
Yeah with RAM prices still inflated over 5x their usual price, good luck with that. $469! $469 for DDR5 2x16, which I paid $90 for the exact pair back in April 2025.
