Due to the costly nature of chips these days, I would expect multiple launch tiers... A budget and a premium model... Which is sort of what the current and last generation offered anyway, just not at launch.

random, but I’m curious how this’ll influence quarterly shipment figures? For instance, should we expect Q1F26 to have been a tad bit inflated and Q2F26 to be very deflated? (Though PS5 didn’t even have a particularly large Q1 this fiscal year…it was pretty much the same as always.)

I hate this, welp I was on the fence whether to get a PS5 Pro or not but I guess I'll wait for a PS6 lol.

I just want to take this opportunity to point out something. When console sales tank in the next few years every analyst will say "Oh but the console market has been shrinking since 2005 so this is no surprise". This is similar to how "smartphones killed handhelds". But in reality, just like handhelds, its the companies sabotaging their own products that will kill the market. The 3DS was 40% more expensive at launch than the DS when factoring in inflation. It also launched with no exclusives outside of Ocarina of Time remake. Vita was a horrible joke and also insanely expensive. People stopped buying handhelds not because smartphones killed the market but because both the 3DS and Vita were way overpriced. If 3DS had launched with a 2DS XL model and Poke'mon as a launch year game it would have made the 3DS hit 100 million lifetime easily.

Anyway, we see the same sabotaging of the console market here by everyone but Nintendo. Consoles no longer have as many physical copies circulating so the savings of buying used games isn't there anymore. Consoles are no longer massively marked down at 50% of launch price. Consoles no longer have exclusives.

If a company actually supports a console with price cuts and exclusives it will sell well. Doing the opposite kills sales.

XBOX is going up much more...... wow.  They might have to give up after the effect of the tariffs are realized.  $80?   That's a lot.  sales will be half of what they were.  Sony's sales may be down 30 or 40%  but at least they are stronger and can weather the  storm.    

This is what I'm fairly likely to do at this point, and I'm European and was interested in the base model, not Pro. I still have enough PS3 and PS4 backlog to probably last until PS6, and that's ignoring my PC backlog. I would have loved to play the rest of my PS4 games on more powerful hardware and probably much faster loading times too, but it's looking less and less likely at this point. Another option is simply skipping PS consoles altogether and just getting the games on PC instead. At this point, I think PS5 has (or will soon have) a total of two games I'm particularly interested in (Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2), and they'll probably come to PC as well.

Yeah I see a lot of "oh young people don't care about consoles any more, they just play F2P games on their phone/PC" but this isn't that surprising when you consider that young people are being hit the hardest by the cost of living crisis and consoles and their games just keep getting more and more expensive.

Gen Z are cutting back on buying PS5s or full price games cos they increasingly just can't afford it with rampant inflation, stagnant wages, rent taking up most of their income, and the the job market being a mess.

They're effectively being priced out of the console space, just like they've been priced out of housing.

PS5 is the first Playstation home console that I'll skip (if partly because I have access to my brother's). These price hikes just make waiting for PS6 an easy decision for me if I remain interested in consoles. And I won't be forever waiting for price drops knowing how this generation played out, the sooner I get one the better.

I remember the trap of being too poor to afford good things and then having bad taste because of it. I thought MK2 and MK3 were the greatest games ever made because they were all my family could afford. We completely missed the launch of the Saturn because Toys R' Us was the only place that carried it and that was an hour away. My brother loved fighting games. We both loved Sega but Saturn was just too expensive and too far from us. 

Gen Z plays on phones but I can't blame them. I would have done the same. Thankfully things were affordable once I got out on my own. But that's no longer the case. You can't just work at a gas station, rent a studio apartment and walk to work anymore to be able to afford things. There's no cheat mode for saving on bills like there was when I was young. 

Yeah when I was a poor Uni student in 2009-2013 I used to play my Wii/360 games over and over again cos I could only afford to buy a game every couple months or so; caught up on a lot of the stuff I missed once I graduated and started earning.

And that was before covid inflation or the housing market going to shit, and when a game cost $60 and a console $200-300.

Kids now have it way worse.