So it will cost $1080 to play a first game on PS6 with no physical copy. I’m going to disable my networks on my Playstaytions so I don’t get any more shittty updates, and switch to GOG. Fuck this walled garden shit.
For similar reasons I just flat out haven’t bought a console since the PS3, except for the Switch. And even that I kind of regret. I really don’t see any appeal anymore. The PS4, PS5, and various 'Bones are just cut down, locked down and DRM laden PCs anyway. There are no interesting architectural quirks anymore, the content and even input methods are all basically interchangeable now, and thus there’s no reason to not just play on the PC I already have aside from exclusivity pigheadedness from Sony or Microsoft.
Now I’m mildly regretting giving my ps3 to my cousin.
Get it back before your discover he sold it or gave itit.
Agreed. I only bought the PS4 because they had Dark Souls 3. Don’t think PC did for ay least a while. I can’t see any games being worth it any longer. I’ll just go outside or read a book if I can’t get something that runs on a regular computer.
Wasn’t there Bloodborne too? But yes, the point stands.
So they are building a more expensive appleTV at this point? Why bother?
Kepler estimated in March that the PS6’s bill of materials (BOM) was approximately $760, so Sony could have conceivably released the console for $699 and recouped its subsidy after selling two or three games per user. However, Kepler now claims that the bill has since climbed by $200, landing dangerously close to four digits.
Moreover, recent comments from Sony to investors indicate that the company does not intend to absorb the increased costs. Responding to several questions, President and CEO Hideaki Nishino emphasized the company’s plan to prioritize profitability over expanding PlayStation’s user base.
So they’ll be releasing a base PS6 at $1100+, because they want more profitability over ‘expanding PlayStation’s user base’?
When was the last time PlayStation’s user base actually grew by noticeable numbers? During PS4’s time?
According to Statista’s PlayStation Network MAU the number of users has been dropping throughout all of 2025. Sony claims there was a spike to 132 million users in December, which would make sense. They usually have higher numbers in the holiday season. Still, 132 million in December 2025 is a measly 2% increase compared to December 2024.
Bro is acting like he has all the cards and everybody wants a PlayStation, while the numbers clearly show otherwise. Especially in 2026 so far. PlayStation just had its worst May in 25 years, and this dude thinks he’s getting so many new users he can throw them away.
I’d like to say that there’s no way this will work for Sony. However, gamers have proven time and time again that they are more than willing to pay insane prices for consoles and games.
I’m guessing this will lead to PS6’s sales being even worse than PS5’s already poor ones. But PlayStation will probably still earn more money due to more expensive consoles, no physical games, and another PS+ price hike or two.
And just like that, sales of decks of cards went through the roof. A deck of cards can be both single-user and multi-player for almost no cost at all.
Just so long as you stay away from modern TCGs, anyhow.
Time for Nintendo to go back to selling decks of cards
Cool, I’ll go PC if its breaks me.
There is no RAM shortage. There is only greed.
We haven’t run out of the ingredients. The machines that make it have not all been raptured.
This is nothing more than greedy assholes demeaning more money for something they can control.
There is no shortage, don’t call it that or you are feeding their narrative.
Why would anyone bother making consumer RAM for cheap when they can use that manufacturing capacity to make it for the AI datacenters instead, who pay a premium?
When the king orders 1000 cakes, the baker isn’t going to be making bread for the peasants.People used to sometimes start businesses in order to bring a high demand product to market at a much more affordable price. Often, because that person actually gave a shit about the things they made/sold.
Sometimes these people would even go on to make more money then if they had just went along with the market rather than undercut it.
But all of that requires long term thinking. And some actual character and principle in the people who do it. Which is apparently all just way too much to ask in 2026.
Well, true. People, I.e private companies, can do all kinds of silly things like respect their workers, or think about the future, or prioritise a myriad of things that aren’t just short-term profits and investor pockets. For them, the term growth isn’t just about revenue and a graph on the stock market.
That doesn’t really work with a publicly traded company, especially when the people in charge get a bonus based on quarterly profits, even if the company makes decisions that destroy it in the future. Memory manufacturers know damn well this isn’t in any way a long term sustainable situation, but they are making the most (money) of it while they can.
Exactly. Public trading puts pressures on a company that go against its interests and the interests of its employees.
Frankly, public trading is a terrible idea. It has never improved anything. Just made everything worse.
This is where Id put my fab
IF I HAD ONE!!!
deleted by creator
A console used to be an appliance where you insert physical media and it just works. What you can play is limited, but you physically owned the games and had the freedom to sell them, trade them, or buy them used. The hardware was subsidized to make up for the lack of selection and at least you had a bit of freedom.
Now it’s just an expensive, locked down machine that plays a limited set of games that you can purchase, but can’t re-sell and can be taken away at any moment. Oh, and the thing requires an internet connection and is always spying on you.
I’m quite happy to wait years for the few exclusives to be available to emulate while playing the remaining games that will also be released for PC on a Linux machine I own and fully control. Even if the hardware costs a little more, it’s unequivocally worth it, especially since it won’t be just a gaming machine.
It really seems like the idea is to create walled gardens where you profit from every part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem gets augmented with surveillance because surveillance provides the information necessary to fine tune the ecosystem. The surveillance gets augmented with automation, scaling techniques, and machine learning because they believe that better data continues producing better results. Results being anything that effectively drives profit: vendor lock in, sales, monetizing resales, monetizing game sharing, reducing labor costs, …
At a certain point, the rest of the world should decide that the American bar is too low and easily competed with — right? I mean, who wants the fruits of late stage capitalism? I imagine nobody who hasn’t been raised and educated within a culture which pre-accepts these things as normal.
When the rest of the world begins competing better, do they thing foreign gaming consoles will be banned like foreign cars?
I think they absolutely plan to ban foreign shit because it’s better than theirs. It’s now a self-contained capitalistic society, which for everyone but them is kind of ideal. Let them human-centipede their own shitty products to themselves.
Look at EVs. We in the US can’t buy cheaper, better performing EVs because of import taxes and tarrifs up to 100%. Instituted by Biden and raised by Trump btw 🙃
To buy a BYD and import it, if the car costs $30,000 USD, you’ll pay more like $150,000 USD after taxes, tariffs, import duties, licensing, registration fees, and shipping costs. And yes, even ones in Canada will still be subject to those costs trying to cross the border of course 🙃. And no, it’s not a hyperbolic number.
There’s tons of loopholes for capitalists not to pay taxes. But a plebian consumer saving money? You bet that shit is battened down, no loopholes to be found. If you look at it the wrong way you’ll be fined.
Agreed, it’s a low bar. Valve is doing it right where it just works if you’re using Steam, but the hardware is still yours to do as you please.
Judging by sales numbers, though, there have probably been a little over 5M Steam Decks sold vs. over 20M Switch 2s, 90M PS5s, etc. These companies have no incentive to offer a more fair deal if the general public will give them money either way. More competition would probably help to your point.
Didn’t buy 4. Didn’t buy 5. Didn’t buy 6.
My ASUS handles any gaming needs that my Acer can’t, and my Acer has Linux and handles everything else.
Sony can eat my whole ass with the price gouging.
Thankfully this no longer matters since Sony just made an announcement which killed any interest in their platform.
Im with you, but the amount of people who dont care is scary high.
I’m pretty shocked people still want physical media, but whatever. I think we can tackle the licensing and lock-in issues with digital medial without pearl-clutching physical media as if it weren’t riddled with its own problems.
Which problems would those be, exactly? Because I can still play Combat or Yar’s Revenge or even history’s most godawful version of Pac Man on my Atari VCS right now if I wanted to. That’s a 44 year old game at the time of writing, for anyone not keeping score at home.
Go try to play, I don’t know, Babylon’s Fall on your PS4 right now and let me know how that works out for you. Or try to track down a copy of Demons Age if you missed it when it came out.
A) what problems are you referring to?
B) DRM free already solves a lot of it for digital titles. Sony, Microsoft, etc are entirely uninterested in that. They wouldn’t be able to pull them from your library if so.
C) Removing physical media completely kills a used market. Dead Space is $20 on disc, $70 on the Sony store. Sony doesn’t want you to think about that though. Sharing becomes nearly impossible. Ironic, considering Sony’s stance for the PS4
The biggest thing is simply this: physical media offers protections from corporate abuse/greed. If digital media wasn’t abused by corporations, we wouldn’t have this issue. Physical media done correctly makes most of those abuses impossible. And, unfortunately, we can’t trust closed source corporations not to abuse us when money can be made. So without a forcing function through legislation, physical media is that forcing function/protection.
Well put.
physical media offers protections from corporate abuse/greed
Does it though? It used to a long time ago but aren’t a lot of discs for games just blocked if you’re not connected to the internet to get required upgrades?
Even if that’s not much of a thing yet, I fear it will be.
That’s why I said physical media done correctly. Because, yes, if the game isn’t on the disc, it won’t work. Or if it forces a day 1 patch to even run because it contains parts of the code. Or the console itself requires the internet for some kind of DRM check. Those aren’t really physical media in my opinion. Or, at best, they’re anti-consumer locks/practices.
Is it perfect? No, the only innovation capitalism has brought us is continually more ways to provide less for a higher price. We’re always having to fight greed unfortunately.
Sure, in an ideal world, buying a key means its yours, but were not there. That’s my gripe. Today, you pay full price for a game. And next year the studio says, too fucking bad, its gone. Now you paid money for something that was taken from you. Its not pearl clutching, its an issue of ownership
PS5 had no games, PS6 is going to have no players. Amazing the speed with wich technology advances.
All the players will be AI agents, you’ll watch them play the games on a $19.99/month streaming service with unskippable ads
And, thanks to Microsoft, they will also have no competition.
Now we know why they stopped shipping games to PC. They need to prep their user base for a hardware price that will have users consider just buying a PC instead, taking away the “I can play the PlayStation exclusives on PC anyway” argument.
yeah have players change that to, “I don’t need to play PlayStation exclusives”
I’m very much in that camp myself. I ducked out from consoles, having owned pretty much all of them since the Atari 2600, after the PS4. So many more amazing games on PC e.g. Song of Syx which would never work on a traditional console but is amazing on PC and even Steam Deck / Steam Controller.
PS3 killed consoles for me
Instead of increasing monthly active users at all costs, the company aims to monetize existing users with recurring revenue, likely from subscriptions and DLC. Furthermore, Nishino stated that PlayStation aims to provide a “seamless” experience that expands beyond the living room, sparking renewed rumors of a portable console.
Instead of increasing monthly active users at all costs, the company aims to monetize existing users with recurring revenue, likely from subscriptions and DLC. Furthermore, Nishino stated that PlayStation aims to provide a “seamless” experience that expands beyond the living room, sparking renewed rumors of a portable console.
So, owning a Steam Machine will be beneficial in the long run because of the frequent sales and realistic gaming prices. Got it!
And the lack of a requirement for a subscription service which means the actual cost of the PlayStation 6 over a 7 year life span is something like $1800. That’s assuming the cost of a monthly PlayStation plus membership doesn’t go up and they continue to subsidize the hardware by selling it at cost. And it doesn’t include buying games.
Oh, no… anyway
So the price of a Steam Machine (that runs as well as a six year old PS5)?
Yeah. But unlike the steam machine, completely locked down and possibly sold at initially no profit which is recouped in games.
And possibly won’t play older games you purchased
