Consoles are running on adrenaline. Serious damage has been dealt but the pain hasn't fully set in yet, so like an MMA fighter blissfully unaware that their forearm has gained a cool new elbow, manufacturers are staggering through the same old motions. And in today's AI-driven component drought, consoles are hurting. Gaming has never been less affordable. But what actually scares me is the apathy I feel at the thought of another console generation.
We're coming up on the seventh year of the PS5 and Xbox Series X. The same old motions demand a new box be enshrined in the hallowed media center, but many of the factors hurting current-gen consoles will only get worse with a new generation. This leaves me wondering: does anyone actually want new consoles any time soon?
The next generation
PlayStation killing discs is bad for everyone, whether you care about physical games or not
The Nintendo Switch 2 just barely made it. Even Nintendo, whose strategy of staying well behind the cutting edge of processors is really paying off today, has marked up prices in response to ballooning production costs (and US tariffs). And Nintendo got lucky, launching its latest handheld just before the landscape soured.
Valve, the latest living room contender, got unlucky, and its Steam Machine's dizzying price offers a glimpse of what is staring down the PS6 and Xbox Project Helix. Nobody is happy with the Steam Machine, least of all Valve. The company wanted, and planned, to price its box significantly lower. Even if you like the Steam Machine – and it has some genuinely solid features and upsides, including a great OS – there's no denying that it costs too much for what it can do. Because of course it does. Everything costs too much right now! And in a world where Valve is selling a weaker PS5 for $1,050 at base, I don't see the PS6 or Xbox Project Helix getting over the price hurdle.
Performance gains have gotten smaller and smaller with each passing console generation.
Console gaming faces mounting challenges. First of all, if you hike the price of consoles too high, you risk pricing them out of relevancy altogether. Microsoft just went through this with Xbox Game Pass. It got so expensive that it lost its use case for millions of people. Everything has a price threshold where people stop caring, and that's especially relevant here because affordability and convenience are core selling points for console gaming. You pay $500 for a box that plays games. Oh, how good we had it.
This is an essential part of the console bargain. It's the fast food problem – worse, really, because games aren't a need. But I get fast food because it's cheap. If fast food and sit-down food are the same price, I'm not going to Taco Bell. In this analogy, console platform holders can thank their lucky stars that PC gaming hardware is also on fire and everyone is pawing their way through the smoke.
But games exist elsewhere, too. Free games that run on phones and potatoes alike are already eating a huge chunk of the rapidly aging gaming market, to say nothing of other media in the attention market. Never mind bringing new or younger players into the next generation; an intimidating price could also block existing console gamers from trading up, and consoles have survived this long by remonetizing the same people in a matured market. Underpinning this is the existential threat of a vanishing audience, which is worthy of its own screed.
Your money's worth
I don't want to buy a new console right now anyway... my PS5 and Xbox Series X still work fine.
Now put two more bricks on the scale. New consoles have to justify themselves with software and hardware. Does this have enough awesome new games to warrant a purchase? Does it run or display my games appreciably better?
Performance gains have gotten smaller and smaller with each passing console generation. Now more than ever, Sony and Microsoft have to deliver big enough upgrades to distinguish new systems without pushing the price so high that people tune out, and I don't know if any architect can do that with the AI monkey on their back. Godspeed, Mark Cerny.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to buy a new console right now anyway, not just because life has gotten more expensive, but also because my PS5 and Xbox Series X still work fine and, frankly, feel untapped. This has not been a great generation for exclusive games, and for many reasons.
A lot of the bids on live service games and studio acquisitions amounted to nothing at best and disaster at worst. Remakes have been injected into release schedules like liquid bandages. As much as a third of developers have been laid off in the past few years. Loads of studios have canceled exciting projects or closed their doors entirely. And bloated production cycles have given us between zero and maybe two games from almost all of the big first-party hitters in the past seven years.
I do not want to minimize the far more important human toll of the games industry's contraction. I just want to also point out that there ain't many system sellers 'round here. (Again, I think Nintendo's strategy of not firing its best people is pulling ahead.) The list of PS5 exclusives could fit on a napkin, or a gum wrapper if you trim it to console exclusives. Xbox is in even worse shape because Microsoft's primary export is layoffs. Sony and Microsoft haven't done a great job securing games for the newest consoles I already have. How are they going to sell me on an even more expensive version?
As soon as we got consoles with NVMe SSDs, I was basically comfortable for life.
PlayStation, for one, is transparently charging more for less. In January 2028, PlayStation will end production of all new physical games. The future of the brand is digital-only, and if you think the new consoles won't follow suit, I've got a bridge to sell you. Maybe programs like Microsoft's rumored disc-to-digital library can take the sting off backwards compatibility, and maybe we get another add-on disc drive to bring PS5 games forward. But physical copies are also a major selling point for consoles. Losing discs hurts, and it hurts everyone.
I'm not predicting the end of console gaming, but year after year of unprecedented times has upended the industry's established cycles. Now does not feel like a good time for new consoles. Few seem ready or willing to buy one, and platform holders appear equally incapable of delivering a product people will or should accept. Frankly, as soon as we got consoles with NVMe SSDs, I was basically comfortable for life. I'd be happy to hunker down for several more years, enjoy the consoles I have, let the AI monkey jump into a woodchipper that it hallucinated was a pile of money, and talk about a new console generation when we aren't living through a particularly heavy chapter of future history books. I would like my times to be a little more precedented. And at this point, I'd be happy if the next few years somehow go that smoothly.
On the topic of using what we already have, check out the best PS2 games that made Sony's second-gen console such an icon.
