Also the call for console isnt the traditional high power box that sits under your tv & only allows you to play game while your at home & instead the future is a hybrid handheld where sure you can dock your handheld to your tv to play like traditional but also play natively on the go outside your house taking your PS & your games wherever you want to play similar to mobile.
It would be a mistake for Sony to make the PS6 a high power traditional box console when the industry is moving more mobile & lowering access to play your games outside your home
I don't think PS6 is going to abandon the traditional "high-power" (I quite hate this term given its origins) market segment, but I do agree Sony need a portable solution in the market that can scale PS6 games and do so in a way where devs don't have to put in any work to scale settings down. Good, smart AI-powered scaling tech in the next-gen PS design shared by the console and handheld would help to make this happen.
They need the option of a home console and handheld co-existing that can run the same games natively just with different settings for the handheld with little if any effort on the part of devs to run on said handheld. The rumor of a PS handheld from people like MLID suggest that the handheld could basically run a scaled-down version of the PS6's chipset (such as half the number of shader cores for a chiplet-based GPU design), which would be one way to make it happen. PSSR would also play a hand in that type of design.
Something else that would be brutal for PlayStation is that at this point they got used to selling games that sell 10m/20m. If they ever drop to selling around 90m like int the PS3 days things will collapse for their internal studios that seemed to all be tied to massive games that take 5 years+ to make.
PS5 selling bellow PS4 would be extremely concerning for PlayStation long term health.
Their bet on PC was just completely misguided and took a lot of momentum away from PlayStation, enough to possibly have killed their business long term (just like PC ports killed Xbox).
A part I wouldn't agree on is that Sony's PC strategy at current has hurt the brand long-term. However, I've always said that if they continue with the current strategy or, especially, if they get more aggressive with it (shorter windows for ports of non-GAAS or Day 1 for non-GAAS titles of all types), that would basically spell the long-term decline of the console's selling power.
When people question this, I just answer with the following: who typically buys new consoles within the first two years? Who usually does the most spending in B2P software in the ecosystem? Subscriptions? MTX/Add-on content? Day 1 purchases of 1P & 3P software? The answer to ALL of those is the same: the hardcore/core enthusiast. And what is the biggest driver for getting hardcore/core gamers onboard for hardware? Exclusives.
If exclusives
WEREN'T the reason, why are the Xbox Series consoles looking to sell under 5 million units for the entirety of 2024, after already seeing unusually high drop-off rates in sales in 2023 and even from the middle of 2022 (barely 1.5 years after the systems launched)? And why do so many people keep ignoring that Xbox is a pretty good barometer of the negative consequences of some of these controversial business decisions, the same way companies like SEGA and Atari (and even Nintendo & Sony in select generations) were?
Again, a worst-case scenario can be avoided as long as SIE have already been making adjustments BTS. I think there's a hint they have when they revealed PHYSINT earlier this year; that game is years out yet I think between complaints of them holding some reveals way too close to the chest AND optics of maybe losing a close-knit partnership with KojiPro to Microsoft (Overdose), they went and soft-revealed PHYSINT at the February SoP. There are rumors they are working with 3P like SEGA and Bandai-Namco on reviving legacy IP like Wipeout as AA titles.
Though, these are counterbalanced to some degree by decisions that IMO kind of sideline the console. The GOT port to PC is technically not too bad in itself timing-wise (have always said 4-6 years at least for non-GAAS ports), but it's a bad look when considering almost all of Sony's current-gen exclusives (cross-gen or not) have gone multiplatform. It also soft-confirms the Nvidia leak again, which has GT7, Demon's Souls and GOW Ragnarok on it. Combined with Spiderman 2's inevitable PC port, we're in a potential situation where
ALL of Sony's current-gen releases will have been ported to PC and/or other consoles before the PS5 Pro is even a year old!
...Well, aside Astro's Playroom (a demo) and Destruction All-Stars (a failed GAAS). That is a
baaad look for a console that needs to provide valuation through content differentiation (exclusives) within the market, no matter how some people want to try downplaying it.
Anyway, I think by the end of the year we'll have a definitive answer as to the future trajectory of PlayStation consoles. Whether SIE have correctly adjusted their multiplat strategy (I'm not gonna go into specifics here, that's what the giant thread from a while back is for), and make other adjustments to better compete or match offerings from growing indirect competitors like Steam and Nintendo or not, we'll have a pretty good indication of it by the end of the year. We have been getting some hints though IMO, like player counts on PS5 for games like Helldivers 2 and Stellar Blade (demo), which at least addresses some of those things.
Where Sony released an expensive console with no games for years? Imagine repeating the same mistake.
They won that generation by making games, lots of them, with high quality, that were only available on the PS3 while the competitor sat on their thumbs. If MS had released a new console in 2010, before PS3 momentum started, things would have been very dire for Sony,
Sony may not've had a ton of HUGE selling games prior to 2010, but they definitely had a good stream of high-quality releases from very early on.
Resistance released in 2006. Uncharted released in 2007. Motorstorm release in 2007. Same with Rachet & Clank: TOD. Warhawk released in 2007. Resistance 2 released in 2008. Echochrome released in 2008. Demon's Souls released in 2009. Killzone 2 released in 2009. Hell, Uncharted 2 (considered the best of the series by many) released in 2009.
