It’s not that long ago that the long-awaited PS5 and its Microsoft rival hit the market. However, neither Sony nor Microsoft are sitting idle and are already developing what will be the future of game consoles. It seems that the new PS6 or PlayStation 6 could arrive sometime in 2028, so it could also be the date chosen by the Redmond company to launch its new Xbox.
When will the PlayStation 6 arrive?
It’s only been two years since the launch of the PlayStation 5, as I mentioned earlier, and these consoles have a cadence to their releases that makes users wait a few years to see a new gaming platform. Even though the arrival of the PlayStation 6 is still a few years away, it’s already being written about and rumored.
Also, this time it’s not just a rumor, but Sony itself has spoken out about the PS5’s successor. It has done so as part of its official comments on the UK’s Competition and Market Authority statement. In its argument, Sony points out that Microsoft has offered to continue publishing Activision games on PlayStation until 2027, and says that by the time the PlayStation 6 launches, it will have lost access to Call of Duty, with all that entails.
So that could be the tipping point for the arrival of the new Sony PlayStation 6 or PS6. In the following tweet you can read the paragraph of CMA from which these conclusions have been obtained:
Sony referred to the next generation of PlayStation console in its CMA response, with the suggested year of release being redacted
This was in a passage where it was referring to losing access to CoD after 2027, with a higher potential for platform switching
PlayStation 6 in 2028? pic.twitter.com/f7govC8R7A
– Piers Harding-Rolls (@PiersHR) November 23, 2022
Piers Harding-Rolls (@PiersHR) November 23, 2022
If true, this would be the longest time span between releases of PlayStation platforms to date:
- 1994-2000
- 2000-2006
- 2006-2013
- 2013-2020
- 2020-2028?
This would be 8 years with the current PlayStation 5, unless Sony is planning to launch some intermediate step in the market when the PS6 arrives, it’s too many years. Will Microsoft do the same with its Xbox to coincide more or less with the launch of the PS6? Will it go ahead with a new model to capture more users on its platform? We’ll see.
Remember, the PS5 launched in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and that led to serious shortages of this product in the first moments of its launch.
Also, if Sony is looking at 2028 for its next generation of consoles, a PS5 Pro mid-generation upgrade landing in 2023 or 2024 (as TV maker TCL has announced) would make sense. Since continuing to support new video game titles with the same hardware would be tricky. In addition to TCL’s rumor, another well-known leaker of GTA (Grand Theft Auto) video game information has also recently suggested that development kits for the revamped versions of the PS are already making their way into the hands of triple-A developers.
PS5 Pro and PS5 Slim for 2023-2024
According to rumors that are surfacing, there could be a PS5 Pro and PS5 Slim revamp sometime during 2023 or 2024. New versions of Microsoft’s Xbox could also appear to take on Sony’s product.
It can be intuited that they would have revamped chips from AMD based on the new Zen 4 microarchitecture and could include improvements in terms of FPS and UHD and 8K display thanks to the integration of the new AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series graphics based on the RDNA3 architecture. At the moment not many more details are known…
PlayStation 6 features
And if few details are known about the next-gen PS5, much less is known about the mysterious PlayStation 6. However, one could make an exercise of imagination to guess what would be some details of this new PS6:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen SoC based on Zen 8 microarchitecture with 3D packaging (and chiplets or MCM).
- GPU: AMD Radeon based on RDNA8 architecture integrated together with the CPU cores.