Big budget and/or long dev time doesn't guarantee massive sales. Heck on occasion it can mean no sales.

Less can be more as long as you're offering what the players want in a quality product for the right price.

Here's a crazy idea - PS6 that can virtualize 2xPS5s or 4xPS4s, or 1xPS5 and 2xPS4s, and then stream them to Playstation Portal/phones/tablets/TVs.

Rumor is Sony wants to go after Switch 2 itself with a dockable handheld. I guess the current heads were not there for Vita or PSP. Or have not looked at video game history. More powerful and more expensive. How many times has that approach beaten a Nintendo handheld in 36 years? 0. Nadda. Zilch.

Sony could (and I emphazie "could") just say, that every game released on their system, with a price tag above x (e.g. 40$) must be available physically and complete on cartridge or whatever different medium they would use, unless the game itself is too large for even the largest one.

However, Sony could to a trick here. I personally dont have anything against installing my games,

as long as they are installed from a medium that is 100% under my control.

So how about data cartridges? Cartridges optimized for capacity and capacity alone, to enable 32, 64, 128 and 256gb

You install the game from them (and the cartrdige acts as the key) There's no need to have them be both, large and fast.

I think that would be a possible solution to get their cost down. SD cards with that size arent exactly the most expensive either, so I see this as realistic.

//EDIT: plus no big company would decide to not release on Playstation, just because they have to offer physical versions to even be allowed to release their game(s)

We can't be that far off this. 

Sony making handheld that can play PS5 games makes sense, due to big library of PS4/PS5 games available right from the gate - and if they allow STEAM on it (since MS apparently will), they have very good value proposition for that handheld, especially if they build it around same tech (UDNA) as PS6, which it appears so.

It seems that quality/performance profiles have already become sort of the norm in console space, so having PS6 games have "handheld" profile is really not that of a stretch - if the rumour is true, that handheld is shy of 5TFLOPS in handheld and 6.8TFLOPS in docked mode, but with much better RT performance than PS5, so it's quite feasible for it to be supported and get all PS6 games as well...in the same way that you can currently play PC games on 5090 or 3060 with different level of experience.

Now if they want to go all out, Cerny will make "home" PS6 with sort of a MIG (multi-instanced GPU) in mind - that is (as I already in a way proposed), it will be allowed to multi-instance its GPU (and rest of the resources) and thus provide, in the same console, either "Full" instance (for best experience), "Half" instance (run your PS5 games or 10th gen games with lower settings) and "Quarter" instance (run PS4 games or 10th gen games on even lower settings)...or something like that, depending on how powerful PS6 ends up.

Why this? So they can have first console that can support whole household at once. You and your kids/friends want to play online match of next CoD at your home? Sure, turn on 1 x "Half" + 2x ''Quarter" instances, or 4x "Quarter", and stream it to TV(s) or other preferred devices. Want to play GTA VI by yourself? "Full" profile. Want to play next Horizon while your significant other plays Witcher 4? 2x "Half". And so on.

I know, crazy...but it could be quite a selling point. Personally, I'd expect this more from MS than Sony, given their knowledge of OS and virtualization, but who knows...

PS6/PSP2. One is a console, the other a handheld. Both can play the same games.

It's been pretty obvious since SteamDeck's announcement that a handheld "Playstation Deck" was on the way. Will be interesting to see how it sells compared to SteamDeck and a potential SteamDeck 2.

With possibly a PS6S model. Maybe.

Assuming the PS6 was a step above PS5 Pro, then I think a PS6S makes plenty of sense.

Question I struggle with is would it make more sense to just put the guts of the handheld as is in a home console and call it a day for $100 less, or would it be better to max out that handhelds hardware performance with a bigger PSU plus upgraded cooling in a home console and charge $50 less or the same as the handheld?

Personally I'd prefer the maxed out PS6S for $50 less or the same price as the handheld. I'd also call the PS6S the main PS6 and the other the Pro model.

Would be kinda funny if this actually happened as myself and others have suggested that Nin do this for SW2. Put the guts in a home console and charge less.

I also played Saints Row 2022. It was a pile of shit. Some of the worst gunplay in a big-budget game. There are shitty low-budget anime games with better gunplay. The writing was unbearably bad. The world doesn't need more Saints Row. It needs another Sleeping Dogs.