PS4.XX. There will be NO PS5

[SamuelRSmith]

While I have no personal preference on which way it goes, I do think there would have to be some major transitions in the way that the gaming market works, in order to support such a business model:

1) The purchasing and pricing models of consoles may have to change. Arguing that it works because it works with phones misses a few key points. While, yes, new phones can be very expensive, more so than any new console, they are a) considered a higher utility product by many consumers compared to consoles, justifying higher prices; and, b) the price of the phone is typically not satisfied immediately upon purchase, and is usually spread across 1-3 years.

2) Software monetization will also have to radically shift. Writing software that supports multiple SKUs will increase testing costs, and potentially bring up development issues. All sorts of considerations are made when writing software about the hardware it is running on. Developers like ND, who pride themselves on "writing to the metal" will be at a significant disadvantage.

If Sony has some kind of mandate that games will have to forward support then next two or three iterations of hardware, this will mean that that developers will still need to be on the project to patch them when issues inevitably arise, which means that publishers will still need to fund it. How many publishers are interested in funding old games well into the future? Hell, EA seems to want to turn off their servers after a couple of years. Or, has anyone tried to play a Call of Duty game that's more than a couple years old? Almost impossible.

And it makes sense, most console games have the bulk of revenue generated at start-of-life, and many gamers are resistant to ideas of microtransactions or subscription models which could move gaming to whole-life revenue generation.

Even iPhone and Android apps will usually require updates to them to keep them working properly on new versions of iOS and Android. If anybody has ever tried using a developer build of a mobile OS with apps that are not yet updated, you will know how unstable they are until they have been patched for the latest versions. And that's only a yearly update, with a simple set of functions. Updates across three years of development, with much more complex functionality to be kept, well, functional, will be dramatically more expensive. It only happens with mobile apps because they receive constant monetization from ad revenues, microtransactions, and subscriptions, and they are far, far, cheaper to keep stable.

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That said, the idea of Sony, MS, and Nintendo, having to "restart" every generation seems like madness. Pretty sure Nintendo aren't happy about losing all their progress from Wii to Wii U, same as MS and Xbox. Sony knows the risk is high of that happening to them in the future, too.

I don't think a model that will impose regular high costs on consumers, or require publishers to support their games for 15 years (!!!) is necessarily the solution.