Hideaki Nishino confirms the PS6 will launch "on schedule"

[Wman1996]

JohnVG said:

JackHandy said:

Going off my region (US), NES to SNES was six years. SNES to N64 was five years. Genesis to Saturn was five years. Saturn to Dreamcast was five years. N64 to Gamecube was five years. PS1 to PS2 was five years. Xbox to Xbox 360 was four years. PS2 to PS3 was six years. Gamecube to Wii was five years.

As you can see, five/six years was pretty standard up until Sony and Microsoft thought it was wise to drag the PS3/360 corpses far past their expiration dates, and the former was the era I grew up in, so it's what I'm use to. Anything longer than five years, and I'm checking out. Heck, at four years things start to get stale for me. I like new consoles, new experiences. It's just my preference.

That's because Sony (and Microsoft) decided to make too powerful machines. That creates many problems for developers: the costs are boosted, the development of a single game is insanely long, the teams have to be huge... or simply become "another indie studio" like the other 10 thousand ones, launching games no one knows... everything is worse when you launch a machine with "giganormous" tech specs. You are stressing the developers and even the big companies.

A lot of it is specs and long development times. 

If a AAA game took 2-3 years almost all the time, consoles would probably have 5-6 years before they were replaced. Now because of a lot of games taking 4-6 years, the cycles need to be 7-8 years. And even when the AAA games take 3-4 years instead of 5 or more, the teams often have to work on more than one IP. Thus, you need the long cycle to get at least one game out in an IP. 

The Last of Us Part II took about 70 months, or a little under 6 years. Pretty sure Sony didn't want to launch PS5 until a title like that was out.