From our other sites
The story
A thread titled “Won’t things turn around once the PS6 comes out?” popped up on 5ch’s hardware/industry (“geha”) board, reviving speculation about the next-gen PS6’s price and specs alongside the usual PlayStation-vs-Nintendo-Switch rivalry debate. Many posters pointed out that Switch has outsold the PS5 by tens of millions of units cumulatively, but later in the thread Sony’s and Nintendo’s financial results were cited as a counterargument, showing Sony’s gaming division ahead on revenue and operating profit. Price speculation ranged from over 200,000 yen to 300,000 yen, and whether GTA6 could be the catalyst driving PS6 adoption also came up.
What people said
Even in America things have gotten so messed up that people earning 12 million yen a year are using food banks.
Just like Xperia, PlayStation keeps circling the drain too.
All the 'schadenfreude squad' (fans who enjoy watching Sony fail) has to do is sit back and watch.
Smart.
If DRAM and NAND flash procurement costs stay elevated,
there's a real chance it launches at 300,000 yen.
If costs do drop, that's exactly when buying a gaming PC becomes the smart move again instead.
Either way, it's cooked.
Having Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Monster Hunter all together wasn't enough last time, and now even that's getting trimmed down.
Oh wait, it can't even beat the Switch 2 to begin with…
It's going to end up as a niche thing only diehard fans buy into.
So basically, if they just cranked out GTA6, 7, and 8 on a yearly cycle, they'd dominate.
Joking aside, the more powerful the hardware gets, the longer game development drags on,
so I'd guess exclusives dry up and the lineup fills with watered-down multiplatform titles instead.
Not every company has billions of yen in dev budget to burn.
If you've got an account you can just wait for the one after next anyway, and PS5 will probably stick around a while longer too.
PS4 stayed relevant for a pretty long stretch, so PS5 could probably last almost until PS7.
It's shining in the Hall of Shame and doing great! 🤗
Yeah, now that I think about it, that's just a declaration of defeat lol
As expected, they shipped it on PS5 barely clinging to 30fps, so it's obvious they'll sell 60fps as the PS6's big selling point to get people to buy the hardware and rebuy the game.
You're completely forgetting a PC version is coming out.
There's no way they can get people to pay full price (10,000 yen) again for a PS6 version of GTA6.
At best, if you already own the PS5 version, you'll get a 1,000 yen upgrade option — that's the most they can offer.
And by then a fully superior PC version will be on the table as an option too.
Reassuring that scrapping physical media is already confirmed.
Apparently even the code-in-a-box retail version of GTA6 sells at full price in physical stores.
This is the world the 'barrier-pushers' (slang for defenders of anti-consumer, anti-resale practices) wanted.
How exactly is this supposed to sell?
Call of Duty won't even be coming out for it anymore!!
Yeah, well.
Even if it comes out on PS5, there's no point releasing it for an expensive PS6 too, so maybe it just won't show up there.
Back in the PS3 days, people were saying everyone would ditch their PCs and even do work on the PS3.
Put out hardware even more powerful than that, and nobody will be able to handle it properly,
and if a single title flops, it could basically bankrupt the studio.
Even so, developers are still true believers in raw power.
Proof: the moment specs jumped from Switch to Switch 2, multiplatform ports suddenly increased —
from the very same developers who wouldn't bother despite the Switch selling 100 million units.
That's how dependent PlayStation's whole strategy is on specs.
The only way to stand out with third-party titles is to stand out on specs.
Truly deja vu.
And when the Pro actually got announced, it was so expensive that, conveniently, PS6 rumors started circulating the very next day, and suddenly everyone was 'PS6! PS6!' lol
No idea when the PS6 is coming out, but once discs get discontinued from 2028 onward, the PS5 fades into the background too.
So if the PS6 has a disc drive, that's an automatic win then.
It's 60 million units behind the same-generation Switch, so a comeback is pretty hopeless at this point.
The terminal-stage symptom here is switching the comparison to the Switch 2 just to feel superior and claim victory.
Whether you compare Switch against the PS4 or the PS5, it's losing either way, so the only option is to pretend it doesn't exist.
Or dig up the ancient PS2 as the comparison instead.
Sony Gaming Division / Nintendo (in ¥100 million)
FY Revenue Op.Profit / Revenue Op.Profit
FY20 26,563 3,422 / 17,589 6,406
FY21 27,398 3,461 / 16,953 5,927
FY22 36,446 2,500 / 16,016 5,043
FY23 42,677 2,902 / 16,718 5,289
FY24 46,700 4,148 / 11,900 2,800
FY25 46,857 4,633 / 23,130 3,601
FY26 48,300 7,000 / 20,500 3,700 (forecast)
PS sure is racking up the losses, huh.
Is cost-cutter Totoki (Hiroki Totoki, Sony's CEO) just that good at his job, or is this profit borrowed against the future that'll run out eventually?
All it does is shift the burden onto users, so who's actually supposed to be happy about this?
Background and key points of this discussion
Since 2025, rising prices for semiconductor memory like DRAM and NAND flash have persisted across the Sony and Microsoft camps, and concerns about next-gen consoles getting more expensive have been raised industry-wide. The price debate in this thread — whether the PS6 will cost 200,000 to 300,000 yen — reflects that broader trend. On the other hand, the earnings figures cited in post 97 aren’t hardware unit sales; they’re revenue and operating profit for Sony Group’s gaming business as a whole, which also includes network-service and software-sales revenue. The thread’s shifting mood often came down to whether posters were discussing the ‘balance of power’ against Switch in terms of cumulative hardware sales or in terms of financial metrics — a distinction readers can easily conflate. The two are fundamentally different measures, and one side being ahead doesn’t cancel out the other side being behind. The backlash against selling a physical GTA6 package containing only a serial code, at full retail price, is also worth keeping in mind when thinking about how physical media is being handled.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [“geha”]) thread “Won’t things turn around once the PS6 comes out?“.
Leave a Reply