I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t mention Nintendo.

They’re absolutely competition for Sony, no matter what they will tell you. Especially now that 3rd party support on Nintendo is the strongest its been since the SNES era and getting stronger by the day. To the point where GTA VI might, just might, be a possibility. 

With games more scaleable than ever, Switch 2’s current specs are more than satisfactory for developers and we’ve reached the point where developing for PS5/PS6 level hardware has become more costly and time-consuming than what its worth. GTA VI can do it because… It’s GTA VI. But a new IP, even from a major studio? That’s a high-risk, low reward decision - Exactly the kind of thing the stock holders you mention frown upon.

And as times change, so do consumer habits. With hardware getting more scaleable, it’s also harder and harder to tell the difference and really justify the additional cost. “Do I really need to spend $800-1,000 on a new PS6, when I can get the same game on my PS5 and it still looks and plays fantastic? Or I can get it on Switch 2, it still looks and plays great AND it’s portable?”

As for the hardcore graphics/spec enthusiasts - People who would spend that much on new hardware will get a PC anyway, even a lower-mid tier PC is already at the rumored spec range of the PS6 for around $1,000-1,500.

If you’ve already saved $1,000, what’s an extra $500 + free online?

The bubble can't pop soon enough.

Stupidest thing ever nuking the consumer electronics sector and potentially crashing the economy just to feed the slop machine.

Lower-mid tier PC's are nowhere near the rumored PS6 specs. And PC prices are increasing a lot more than consoles' because they require a large amount of DDR RAM, a component that doesn't exist in consoles.

And while Switch 2 isn't quite as "indirect" a competitor as some of its predecessors, it still won't be a direct competitor to Playstation anytime soon. People will still buy it primarily for Nintendo games, and Playstation will dominate console 3rd party sales as usual.

Switch 2 faces a greater medium term challenge than Playstation. PC will be fine, because it doesn't need to sell a ton of new hardware to remain dominant. Most PC gamers still play on weaker PC's than a base PS5.

Pay has no limits.

Upper mid-tier (RTX XX60ti - XX70) PCs are probably going to be comparable to the PS6 when it releases, especially if it is delayed. An upper mid-tier PC has cost about $1000 - $1300 since 2020. The price of individual components have shifted (in 2020 there was a GPU crisis; in 2026 it's a ram crisis), but the overall price of such systems have been mostly stable. I bought an RTX 3060ti pre-build PC in 2021 (pre-build because of the GPU shortage) for $1200 and that was in the middle of the GPU crisis induced by GPU crypto-mining. RTX 3060ti's hit about $600 then, separately. Similarly, you can get RTX 5060ti prebuilds for that same price today. A PS5 cost $500 then. A PS6 at a hypothetical $700 is a lot closer to the $1000 - $1300 upper-mid range PC, price-wise, than the PS5 was in 2021. So it doesn't sound unreasonable for a $1000-$1300 RTX 6060ti PC to start cutting into a $700 - $800 PS6's sales. 

The ram price increases for PC's have mostly been counteracted by the fact that CPUs are a lot cheaper-per-performance than they have been historically. Both Intel and AMD have great mid-tier CPUs, especially when talking about gaming in the $200 - $300 range. GPU's are also a lot lower than they were 5 years ago, even if not as low as they were 15-20 years ago. 

Yeah I don't think it'll be til Switch 3 where Nintendo will truly be considered an easy alternative to playstation to the average gamer. 

2027/2028 upper-mid tier PC's >>>> current low-mid tier PC's. PS6 will probably trade blows with a 5080 and beat it overall outside rasterization. When I hear "Lower-Mid tier PC" I think Series S to PS5. Not PS6 lol.

And I think your take is too optimistic. PC GPU prices will likely skyrocket by 2028. I also think Sony might launch an entry level PS6 (more comparable to PS5) as a cheap "PS6 Handheld" variant, but without the battery or screen (like the Vita TV). So their entry point will be a lot lower than $800, but of course with a fraction of the capability.

PC is definitely a threat to Sony in the long run. But it's not going to kill the brand too soon (may not even be enough to stop Playstafion's generational revenue + profit growth) and I'm pretty sure the RAM situation will affect PC hardware sales a lot more than Playstation until RAM prices go down.

The power per dollar difference between PS5DE (at launch) and PC is probably never going to be repeated (PS5's only major flaw was a lack of ML based upscaling). But Sony couldn't capitalize on it (PS5DE was hardly available for two years), and the console's price kept increasing. Pretty sure I heard PC beat PS4 and Xbox One in power per dollar at some point in the generation, so PS5 was overall a win for consoles in this respect.

Yeah I don't think the PS6 is going to be equivalent to current low-mid tier. Who was saying that? 

By the time the PS6 releases (probably end of 2027) the 5080 will be old news. By then it will be trading blows with an RTX 6060ti/RTX6070 and AMD's RDNA 5 PC offerings. They're probably going to out-class the 5080 in terms of feature-specific performance too (albeit not rasterization.) 

I think right now ram prices are the highest they are going to be in the next five years. Mostly because the big AI companies are already working on optimizations, and scaling by parameters/data has slowed down considerably over the last few years. Mid-tier consumer GPU prices are probably not going to go up much, given that there is now more competition in that area from AMD. I do think upper-tier gaming GPUs will increase though, since they also target non gamer markets (local LLM users, mostly.) 

Also neural-rendering is the next big thing. We'll see if PS6/AMD can keep up with that. If they can, then consumer GPUs probably won't increase too much in price. If they can't, then the gap that you're talking about between mid-range Ampere vs. PS5/mid-range RDNA2 probably will repeat itself. 

PAOerfulone said:

"Even a lower-mid tier PC is already at the rumored spec range of the PS6 for around $1,000-1,500."

I don't necessarily disagree with most of your points. The PS6 is going to be about as capable as a 6060ti or a 6070, provided they don't get revolutionary features abscent in PS6's GPU.

Oh I missed that. $1,000 - $1,500 is more like upper-mid tier if you compromise and get 16 GB of ram rather than 32GB (which should be fine, not great, but better than getting a worse GPU and more ram), so maybe PAOerfulone is considering "lower-mid" tier to mean what we're calling "upper-mid" tier, although even then PS6 is probably going to outclass the current upper-mid tier. Like you said, slightly better than RTX 5080 overall, which is more "upper" than "mid." 

Feature-wise I think it is mostly a matter of if AMD can get developers to use their neural-rendering features to their fullest, just like Nvidia is pushing. Things like the current ray-reconstruction/regeneration difference, in an AMD sponsored title, is worrying there. Although, on the other-hand, PSSR 2.0 is a good sign. At the very least AMD does have the features now, just not in parity support-wise, which wasn't true for RDNA2 vs. Ampere.