Big quote: Consoles usually get cheaper as they age, but the cheapest PS5 now costs $200 more than it did at launch. Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden thinks fixing that would mean more to players than a faster PS6. "I think we have enough power in the machine," he said. "The innovation needs to come not from making PS6 for $1,200 – it's to make another PS5 for $300. Now, that would be true innovation."
Layden made the case on a recent episode of The Trophy Room podcast. He ran PlayStation's US business and later its worldwide studios before leaving Sony in 2019, so he's seen a few console generations from the inside.
The PS5, meanwhile, has gone the other way. "This is the first platform that I've seen that has gone up in price over time," Layden said. Since April, a standard model has cost $649 in the US. Even the Digital Edition now goes for $599, up from $399 at launch. That's mostly because AI data centers are soaking up the memory chips consoles rely on.
Layden argues those prices shut out the buyers who usually jump in late in a generation, once hardware gets cheaper. US console sales have already been slowing as prices climb, too.
Older generations also brought upgrades people could see right away, he added. The jump from PS1 to PS2 was "incredible," as was the move from CDs to DVDs. Even the PS4 arrived fully networked for just $399. But the PS6's rumored upgrades mostly come down to more ray tracing and more teraflops – gains he doesn't think the average player would really notice.
That's why he'd rather Sony stop chasing specs altogether. "What the company needs to do is do what it's never done, which is don't iterate the console," he said. "Make it smaller, make it cheaper, do all the things you can around that."
Sony has actually tried the first part already. The slimmer PS5 that arrived in late 2023 was more than 30% smaller than the original. But neither model got cheaper – the Digital Edition actually climbed $50 to $449. By comparison, the PS3 Slim and PS4 Slim both launched at $299.
Layden also thinks Sony would have "a good chance of winning" with a PS6 handheld, but only if it doesn't launch a home console at the same time.
Sony, for its part, still hasn't settled on a PS6 price or launch date, so the $1,200 figure is just Layden's own hypothetical. CEO Hiroki Totoki has also warned that memory prices should stay very high through fiscal 2027. That probably makes even holding PS5 prices steady a challenge, let alone cutting them to $300.