PlayStation 6 Development Moves to Sony’s Frontline

The release of the Nintendo Switch 2 went relatively smoothly: apart from delayed deliveries by some electronics stores, Nintendo can look back on the most successful launch of a console in history to date. More than 3.5 million consoles went over the virtual and stationary counters in the first four days. Shortly afterwards, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox consoles in cooperation with Asus and now Sony has also expressed itself a little more clearly about the Playstation future.

So far, there have only been vague statements in the court documents at the takeover process that the next generation of stationary consoles will not be released until 2028 at the earliest. The former and long-time Sony employee had also confirmed this date as likely in a statement. In addition, there were leaks at the end of 2024 that Sony was already working with AMD again on the PS6’s next system-on-a-chip so as not to jeopardize backward compatibility by switching to Intel.

What did the Sony CEO say about the new PS6?

As Videogameschronicle reports, there was recently a business segment meeting with Hideaki Nishino, the new president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. There he was asked specifically about the new Playstation hardware. He emphasized that the console business is now a versatile platform at Sony. A significant part of the 124 million players would still play on the PS4 (he did not give exact figures here), but he also knows that there is a lot of interest in a PS6.

Therefore, the development of the next Playstation generation is Sony’s top priority (interestingly, he never seemed to talk specifically about PS6, but this name should be safe after the predecessors). They are particularly focused on offering players new ways to interact with the content offered. Considering that small optimizations such as the trigger effect of the PS5’s Dual-Sense controller provide better immersion, we can look forward to seeing what innovations await us. Hideaki Nishino clearly said that he could not reveal any details at the moment.

How does Sony see cloud gaming in the future?

Cloud gaming was also a big topic at the meeting. Hideaki Nishiono is said to have emphasized here that he thinks this is a practical thing, but also knows that the team is convinced that the demand for locally executable games is still very high. Reasons for this could be mainly due to the technical equipment of many players, who simply have too slow online connections and are therefore reluctant to depend on network connections.

Even if Sony provides a stable cloud streaming offering, end-to-end network stability is not in their hands. In addition, there would be even higher costs per game duration compared to locally played games. In short, console hardware still seems to be more important to Sony than delivering games through other channels like cloud gaming.

Lynn Azar, Sony’s senior vice president of finance and corporate development, added that the release cycle has now been reduced because the overlap of different console generations is yielding good results. Specifically, she spoke of the fact that the PS4 generation would continue to generate very good revenue even years after the release of the PS5, even if PS5 users were the “most dedicated gamers with the highest spending per player”.