Sony has a hit with the PS4, so 2019 sounds understandable for PS5. They could ride the game flood wave easy for the next 2 years without any need to go lower than $200, or even $250, until very near end of life. Scorpio hasn't proven its viability and with the wild card success Switch and its "less gfx tech," Scorpio might get brushed under the rug much like the PS4 Pro for many. The only situation that would reasonably change this fact would be a killer and unexpected software taking the market by storm, like Breath of the Wild, Halo, Pokemon, etc. did during their initial releases. Bar this situation from happening, we are much more likely to see a return of a Playstation Portable to tap into the Switch trend sometime in 2018.
It would be ideal if Sony designed a Switch alternative that played PS4 game discs, but unfortunately without the foresight to predict the market excitement for such a product amongst the Sony handheld decline, the huge DVD discs will be an unattractive feature for a handheld product. If Sony could incorporate the PSN to log game ownership and transfer that in some way to a pure digital download catalog, then perhaps they could overcome that concern, but they would need a massive storage space on the launch model, not before seen on a handheld device, to accommodate existing game catalogs. Coming off the successful PS4 library would make the new console a market buster out of the gate. Given the trend to sell newly packaged versions of old games generation after generation, this may not be a favored path with developers, but they will do what they can to survive if the rules must change. Both MS and Sony have been known to take huge hits upfront for a back-end benefit. They can even resell these digital transfers at a percentage off for existing owners to play on the new system with added portability. If Sony does all the background work in the infrastructure of the new formatting, then there may be no need for much added development time from the original developers.
The other possibility is that Sony could surprise everyone with a completely new, inventive, and revolutionary tech that the game industry has never seen before that either flies or dies, but usually the bigger entertainment companies do not feel the need to take those levels of risk. The market is going to get very interesting again in the next year.
