Why are people already talking about the PS6? The PS5 only just rel... oh, wait

There’s been a buzz for the last week or two about what PlayStation’s successor to the PS5 might be. Suggestions that there could be a handheld companion to the (presumably) PS6, and that it might even follow in Nintendo’s Switch-shaped footsteps and be both a home and a handheld console. A move that will be both logical and brave considering the hold Nintendo has on that particular market if it’s true.

While I’m sure PlayStation has been working on its next console from the second it shipped the PS5, these rumors, some of them seemingly pretty concrete, about what the PS6 might be have left me a little taken aback. How is PlayStation so far along with its next console that details are already starting to find their way out into the world? It only just released the PS5.

Except it didn’t just release the PS5. The PS5 is almost five years old. PlayStation has never waited longer than seven years between home console releases, which means, barring a major gear shift, the PS6 is only two years away. Just typing that made my tummy feel weird.

When it comes to the PS5, there are a few reasons why it feels like we only just got this thing. The scarcity when it launched is a big one. A lot of us, myself included, simply couldn’t get a PS5 when they launched. I didn’t get mine until February the following year, and I was still a relatively early adopter in the grand scheme of things.

Not only have a lot of PS5 owners spent far less than five years with their newest PlayStation, but there also haven’t been as many flagship exclusives. I know ‘PS5’s got no games lol' is basically a meme at this point, but it really hasn’t had much from PlayStation’s core series and studios. Nothing new from Naughty Dog, Santa Monica’s God Of War Ragnarok was a cross-gen game, and just a, somewhat underwhelming, Lego game from Horizon. Hey, I liked it, but it feels like I'm in the minority.

Most of all, though, more than supply failing to meet demand and fewer exclusives than usual, is that game development has reached its limit when it comes to graphical improvement and innovation. The days of being floored by how much different games look from one generation of consoles to the next has long gone. Honestly, barring a few examples like Death Stranding 2 and (almost defintiely) GTA 6, we probably topped out on that front about a generation ago.

That’s the main reason why the prospect of there being a PlayStation 6 two years from now has me shook because, well, why? It’s not like the jump from the PS1 to the Ps2 where game tech and development had progressed so much that game devs needed new machines to realise their visions. There is pretty much nowhere else to go. I’m fully aware that I probably sound like the people who used to say everything had been invented 100 years ago, but really, if you have a PS5, are you really starting to think the games you play on it are already beginning to look dated?

At the very least, I think the gap between the launch of the Ps5 and the arrival of the PS6 needs to be longer, and there’s a chance that happens. There were six year gaps between PlayStation’s first consoles, and that has been upped to seven for the last two. Maybe this is where we see the the length of a PlayStation console generation cranked up to eight years and we have to wait until 2028 to see what exactly a PS6 looks like. That's what Nintendo just did with the Switch, so if PlayStation really is trying to mimmick Nintendo's success, maybe an eight year gap is the way to go.

With talk of a handheld PS6 already doing the rounds, and PlayStation’s want to have its own, more powerful version of what Nintedo’s doing, I don’t think we’re going to be waiting that long. Plus, more than anything else, the second the PS6 drops, people will be throwing their money at PlayStation to make sure they’re among the first to own one. That’s if it releases in 2027, 2028, hell, even if it dropped tomorrow. The price and the negligible difference between what it can do compared to a PS5 won’t matter. People will buy it, and that’s why we’ll keep getting new consoles at as steady a rate as we always have, even if we don’t need them anymore.

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