New estimates of the price of the PlayStation 6 suggest its memory alone will cost $680 – equivalent to £510 – and that’s before any other components are added.
The idea that the PlayStation 6, and Xbox’s Project Helix, will cost in excess of $1,000 (£750) has been floating around for years now, ever since the component crisis, caused by the rush to build AI data centres, saw the cost of memory and hard drives skyrocket.
There are signs that the AI bubble may finally be about to burst, at least in terms of data centres, but so far prices are still going up, so there’s really nothing Sony or Microsoft can do to keep the cost of new consoles down, unless they want to sell the new hardware at a loss – which Sony has specifically said they don’t intend to do.
So, when one of the industry’s most reliable leakers claims that the RAM and NAND (a type of flash memory) alone will cost over $680 (£510) for each console you know that the PlayStation 6 itself is going to be even more expensive than previously assumed.
Insider KeplerL2 made the comments on the NeoGAF forum, after having previously said that the raw materials for the PlayStation 6 was already nearly $1,000.
If that bill of materials figure has already increased then the console is almost certainly going to cost more than £1,000, which is madness in terms of a supposedly mass market device.
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Given the PS5 Pro is already nearly £800 in the UK, it’s clear that a new console costing over £1,000 is not nearly as impossible as it would have seemed at the beginning of this generation. But then the PS5 Pro is only aimed at hardcore fans, not casual gamers.
Rumours suggest that Project Helix is aiming for a 2027 launch and that Sony will attempt to match that, but it’s unlikely that either manufacturer has set their plans in stone yet, not least given the volatility of the markets.
It’s possible that the next generation will be delayed, in the hope that the component crisis will begin to subside, which is more likely if the data centre industry does collapse (although the effects of that on the wider economy will no doubt cause even greater problems) but at the moment Sony has given no real indication of when the PlayStation 6 might arrive.
Indeed, apart from KeplerL2’s revelations, almost all the rumours about Sony’s next gen plans revolve around some kind of portable device, which is believed to be able to run PlayStation 5 games at a lower level of fidelity.
The situation is confused, with almost no official information to go on, but the cost of RAM, and hard drives, is a very clear and troubling fact, that even a company the size of Microsoft has no way of getting around.
Releasing a new portable based on current gen technology does seem a useful stopgap, before a more traditional PlayStation 6, but whether that’s actually what Sony is planning remains to be seen, with no current indication of when they might make an official announcement.
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