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PS6 release date speculation, news and rumours on Sony's next console
Is the PlayStation 6 arriving sooner than we think?
Sony
- Cole Luke
- , George Storr
Published: Tuesday, 7 July 2026 at 5:37 pm
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It's unequivocally a very difficult time for the gaming industry right now, with hardware costs skyrocketing amidst what is already a poor global economy, and so all eyes are on Sony for when we might see the PlayStation 6 release date, whether or not the PS6 will be delayed or not, and how much the console could cost.
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As console generations typically last seven or so years, we should be approaching what would be the natural end of the PS5 being Sony's current-generation machine, but many fear this could be longer due to the memory price crisis.
Of course, despite this being a huge existential threat to the console industry, Sony seems quite content on shooting itself in the foot at a time they need their fans the most.
We're not entirely convinced that the PS6 will face a meaningful delay, as we'll get into, but for one, Sony won't want Project Helix to stand unopposed, and Sony can lift a few ideas from Nintendo to make things more interesting to consumers.
With all this in mind, let's see what might be in store for the PS6.
When will we get a PS6 release date?
PlayStation Direct. PlayStation Direct
The PS6 doesn't look likely to launch until 2027 or 2028, according to official documents and speculation that has been made around them.
Market conditions have changed drastically in the last year, with memory pricing in particular proving to be a sticking point, preventing Sony from committing to a release date, as was and is the case with the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, respectively.
In a recent earnings call, Sony president and CEO Hiroki Totoki told a journalist (translated by Sony), "We have not yet decided on at what timing we will launch the new console, or at what prices” adding, "Looking at the current circumstances, the memory price is also expected to be very high FY [Financial Year] 2027, because there will still be a shortage of supply. So under that assumption, we must think carefully what we will do", as reported by VGC.
Looking further back, as part of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority investigation into Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard that took place in 2022, documents have revealed that Sony does not intend to release a new console until after 2027.
The interesting part of this document, which certainly seems to imply that Sony will not be launching the next PlayStation console on this side of 2027, reads as follows:
"Microsoft has offered to continue making Activision's games available on PlayStation only until 2027... By the time SIE launched the next generation of its PlayStation console (which is likely to occur around [redacted]), it would have lost access to Call of Duty and other Activision titles, making it extremely vulnerable to consumer switching and subsequent degradation in its competitiveness."
"Even assuming that SIE had the ability and resources to develop a similarly successful franchise to Call of Duty, it would take many, many years and billions of dollars to create a challenger to Call of Duty – and the example of EA's Battlefield shows that any such efforts would more than likely be unsuccessful."
PS5 console and PS4 console. Sony
This roughly falls in line with the length of recent console cycles, a cycle which Sony's Executive Vice President of Hardware Engineering and Operation Masayasu Ito confirmed would be repeated in an interview with Game Informer.
He said: "In the past, the cycle for a new platform was seven to 10 years, but in view of the very rapid development and evolution of technology, it’s really a six to seven-year platform cycle."
He added: "Therefore our thinking is that as far as a platform is concerned for the PS5, it’s a cycle of maybe six to seven years. But doing that, a platform lifecycle, we should be able to change the hardware itself and try to incorporate advancements in technology. That was the thinking behind it, and the test case of that thinking was the PS4 Pro that launched in the midway of the PS4 launch cycle."
Furthermore, Omdia senior analyst George Jijiashvili told IGN that 2028 is what the company is expecting too: "We are expecting the PS5 Pro to be released in late 2024 — a year later than the equivalent PS4 Pro in its lifecycle. With that logic, we believe Sony is looking to extend PS5’s life cycle, with PS6 most likely to launch in 2028."
So there's still likely a fair few years before Sony commits to its next console. If you've been on the fence, now is as good a time as any to upgrade to a PS5.
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Will the PS6 be delayed? Rumours explained
To start off with, a product with no release date can't really be delayed, though of course, the company could be looking at an internal delay.
There is precedent for this. The Nintendo Switch 2 was ready for years before it released in 2025. The understanding was that this was done as Nintendo wanted to wait until enough games were ready to release around and shortly after the console launched.
Nintendo had the luxury of selling millions of original Switch's too, so there was no great rush to get a new system out.
But, back to the PS6, we have already seen the sales figures for PS5 sharply decrease in the wake of console price hikes, as noted by industry analyst Christopher Dring.
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This is likely to continue, at least until the launch of GTA 6, which has had very Sony-specific marketing to date, but it can only generate so many millions of units sold, especially as many will be looking to buy the system secondhand to save some cash.
After that, then what? Sony will need a new console to drive the brand forward, and in our opinion, it is unlikely that Sony will want to delay things, as it would be a massive gamble for them to take.
Our reasoning for this is that Sony will have inked deals for the AMD hardware powering the PS6, which will likely be manufactured by TSMC, and this will likely cost a fair old whack.
As we'll get onto later, Sony will likely have deals with memory manufacturers, such as Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, and it's a safer bet to release a console sooner rather than later, as it could end up costing even more down the line.
Furthermore, if prices do come down, Sony could reduce the cost of components in phases, lagging behind the market in order to make back a bit of profit, and so that they do not get caught out by any sudden spikes in manufacturing costs.
With this in mind, we do not anticipate the PS6 will face a lengthy delay.
PS6 price: How much could it cost?
The Xbox Series X and Sony PlayStation 5.
Due to the ongoing memory pricing crisis, we can no longer rely on previous console generations to gauge a PS6 price.
There have already been multiple price increases for the PlayStation 5 this console generation, something Microsoft, Valve and Nintendo have also had to contend with.
Something we can absolutely count on is the PS6 costing more than the PS5 did at launch, even when adjusted for inflation.
In a recent poll, Digital Foundry found that 41% of its viewers would pay $699, $799 and more for a PlayStation 6, which is an increase of $200 and $300 over the PS5 Digital and Disc editions, respectively.
This would likely translate to a £599 or £699 price here in the UK, once VAT is taken into consideration.
Digital Foundry's viewers are more immersed in the gaming world than a typical consumer, but Sony will no doubt have insight into telemetry that will inform the company how much users would be willing to pay.
The memory pricing crisis has continued to worsen, and Micron, one of the three major memory module manufacturers, has just locked in sixteen strategic customer agreements with five-year price terms, meaning that memory is going to cost a lot for quite some time.
Over on ResetEra, trusted leaker KeplerL2 claimed that the PS6 bill of materials (BOM) has risen to around $960. As the poster points out, the BOM does not include costs such as research and development, labour, marketing, sales and so on, meaning that the overall cost would likely be in excess of $1000.
Typically, consoles are subsidised, with the expectation that the platform holder will make money on sales and services such as PlayStation Plus, but in reality, we could see the PS6 be somewhere close to £999.
Times have changed, however, as in a Sony Q&A, the company stated that " it is not realistic for us to absorb all the component cost increases" and that "As a principle, we do not intend to sell hardware at significant losses.”
What could we expect from the PS6?
Astro's Playroom PS5 DualSense controller. Sony
Given market conditions, we could expect the PS6 to launch sometime in 2027 or 2028, depending on how much memory modules will cost. We can reasonably assume the console is going to be more expensive, but the PS6 should be more forward-looking than its predecessor, with technologies that allow it to work harder and smarter.
We have already seen the introduction of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), a machine-learning-based upscaler that allows the PS5 Pro to render games at a lower base resolution before upscaling to a higher resolution. This means that developers can use more resources on features such as ray-tracing.
Sony and AMD, the latter of whom have provided PlayStation APUs (chips that include a processor and graphics processor) since the PS4, have already publicly entered a collaboration, Project Amethyst, which sees the two companies working on features such as image upscaling, as well as what sort of hardware functionality the upcoming AMD graphics cards, RDNA 5, will have.
In terms of how this will translate into real-world performance, many believe that the PS6 will have the graphical capabilities of a video card in the region of an Nvidia RTX 5080, being capable of advanced ray-tracing and able to deploy frame generation.
In terms of what games the PS6 will get, there is likely to be a lengthy cross-generation period shared by the PS5 and PS6, as given how expensive the console may end up being, uptake may be slow, and so developers and Sony will want to maximise the player count and sales of new games.
When the PS5 launched, there were many cross-gen titles, such as Dirt 5, which was capable of running at 120 FPS on the then-new console.
We will likely see this again, as well as games featuring more ray-tracing techniques. Older titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 may receive updates to improve visuals, too.
To help sell the console, there will no doubt be some sort of exclusive title that shows off the capabilities of the new system.
Sony's decision to pull back from launching its single-player titles on PC means that whatever exclusive the PS6 has, it will have to be mightily impressive to warrant the cost of the box.
But one wildcard is that it's likely we will see a PS6 handheld, and so games will have to be able to run on that system, as well as the premier home console.
All said, the next generation is going to be interesting, especially as Valve is making more inroads with the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and SteamOS becoming available on more systems.
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Authors
Cole LukeFreelance Writer
Cole Luke is a freelance journalist and video producer who contributes to Radio Times Gaming. He also has bylines for Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, Network N and more.
George Storr
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