PS6 and Xbox Project Helix "will start at a 50% higher price" than PS5 and Xbox Series X, predict analysts following Sony price hike – and $999 "is not impossible"
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/ps6-and-xbox-project-helix-will-start-at-a-50-percent-higher-price-than-ps5-and-xbox-series-x-predict-analysts-following-sony-price-hike-and-usd999-is-not-impossible/Open linkView original on lemmy.world345
Comments147
Maybe the Gabecube will launch with a "console price" after all.
I'm kinda hoping valve waits for component costs to calm down before releasing it - otherwise I could see the price making it DOA.
I imagine it won’t do console numbers, but I’m sure there will be enough fans and early adopters to justify the added expense of a 2026 launch. However, I’d like to think the popularity will grow organically as the system gets older and prices start dropping again.
I want them to at least wait for these next gen consoles to drop because I think a lot of people are still in denial.
I pray for immaculate memtests on us all for all eternity.
Seriously, anything after 2015 has perfect graphics, I don't need slightly more realistic hair or whatever. Even a lot of 2010 is enjoyable. And this is only about graphics quality. For gameplay, story etc, you know shit actually matters, there already is way more than I can play.
Playing games in the modern era for better graphics is like watching the latest movie because it used a really cool high tech camera.
You should play new games for the artistry and quality of gameplay, story, and other elements, same as ever.
But that doesnt mean new games have no value. You're just fighting against a straw man to begin with.
But they already knew how to make games with artistry, quality gameplay, story and other elements in decades past. Which is why that person's point was that you don't need access to the very latest games for enjoyment and now that graphics have peaked, there's no real reason to buy a game that runs like shit on what might not be a top of the line PC.
Same reason could apply to movies and music to say no one "needs" to watch or listen to newer stuff.
Then you become the old man telling kids to get off the lawn. It's anyone's right to be like this.
Huh?
You don't need brand new hardware for new movies. A movie will provide you with 1.5-3 hours of enjoyment at a time and it'll get old quickly when you rewatch the same ones over and over again. There's literally no reason not to watch new ones as they come out.
If it cost me 2 grand (price of a passable gaming rig in 2026) every 5 years to be able to watch the newest movies, damn right I'd be way more into discovering old movies.
Financial concerns are separate from what I was discussing. Every hobby has different gatekeeping elements for involvement or continued involvement, be it camping or gaming. Obviously we need to live our lives within our individual limits.
However that in no way affects my earlier point, which obviously you are free not to follow or heed. It's just a point that distinguishes the idea that the straw man argument ("there is no need to play the latest games because graphics have peaked in 2015 and old games already contain good things i want from games") doesn't address the fact that new games come out with valuable elements that that person themselves demonstrably values.
But they're really not when we're discussing the necessity of building a new PC or buying a new console every few years just so you could play the latest games.
If you've got the finances to do so, go right ahead and do it. But if you're broke, like half of Lemmy seems to be, maybe skip on it and play older games that provide just as much entertainment value and look maybe 5% worse... You'll be able to play the current newest games on mediocre new hardware in 5 years.
As a long time PS customer, the Steam Deck has been probably the smartest/luckiest impulse purchase I’ve made. I used to not have a PC backlog, but now I own a PC port of pretty much all my favorite console games PS4 and backwards, among others, and the majority of those purchases have fallen under the “might-as-well-at-that-price” category of expense. I’ve been playing on Deck nearly every day since I got it and have only scratched the surface of library I’ve built since buying it.
Between Humble Bundles and Fanatical I've got more games than I can play in a year for less than a single new release. It's amazing.
The reason I have 130 games installed on my Steam Deck. My backlog has gotten absurd to the point of comedy. I'm set for years.
This year I try to stop this. Went 2 months without buying a single game. I have an absurd amount of games and the list of games i actually want to play is so large it would still take years to complete.
Famous last words, now your RAM and GPU are going to fail
I have literally never in my life bought the next generation console because I had run out of games that I was planning to play on the current generation, and my first console was a NES. Every upgrade has been a matter of convenience because someone was getting rid of their old (new to me) console, or because I was interested enough to give the new one a try at a reasonable price point. Never "Oh my god, I've got to have that new console, I don't give a fuck what it costs!"
I'm not sure how concerned game companies are with the upgrade demographic as opposed to the "I'd like to buy a new console" demographic, but if everyone bought new consoles the way I do, the industry would have crashed back in the 90s.
take of path of exile, warframe, and/or guild wars and just never buy a ‘new’ game again
Haha ok buddy, can't wait to see you puzzling about why millennials hate game consoles or whatever when launch sales numbers are rightly in the shitter
Yeah, feels like the correct move here would be to hold off with the next generation, if you can't get enough of a performance jump without increasing prices. Otherwise you're just offering a premium edition.
You...
You think they care?
They want people streaming games to phones/TVs and paying by the hour.
Not subsidizing console sales anymore will make cloud gaming seem more attractive, and that's where the most money is at
Looking forward to indie developers who actually want their games to sell optimizing them for older, more reasonably priced hardware.
Google couldn't make cloud gaming work when the entire world was stuck inside with a sudden desire to play more video games. They were given an underhand toss for the best possible scenario to get cloud gaming off the ground, and it didn't take. The math doesn't work out.
Conspiracy theories are a trick by big Dumb to make people think less.
This sounds like a conspiracy theory.
Well, here I was thinking that Steam Machine had priced itself out of the market, but it sounds like it's gonna end up having parity with PS6 anyhow
Next-gen consoles are rumored to be around a 5080 in terms of performance. With 32GB of unified ram, $1000 would be a good deal for that level of performance. If Microsoft added the ability to run windows on it, that would be a pretty compelling package.
Hopefully things will get better, but with ram prices where they are the steam machine would probably need to be $900 if it launched today without being subsidized by valve and is around the performance of a base PS5.
I hate to say it but consoles may be the better deal next-gen.
You speak with an awful lot of authority for someone who is just making stuff up.
Everything they said used indefinite qualifiers. What are you talking about?
I thought nobody knows the specs for it yet?
These are the rumored specs according to moore’s law is dead. Of course things could change or he could have gotten misinformation.
MLID has <50% accuracy IIRC, so everything to be taken with a spoonful of salt. Not saying it's definitely wrong, of course. He's gotten things right sometimes too.
Okay, I guess it’s PC then.
Stares at RAM and GPU prices
laughs in old ebay acquisitions and retro games
You're sitting on a gold mine - first DDR6/HBM, then DDR5, then DDR4 got expensive. If trends continue, somewhere around 2028 you'll be able to sell that desoldered 128KB of SNES RAM for a fortune.
Hoping DDR3 prices go up so I can finally sell the 128 GB of RAM I have been saving "just in case" lol
Hoping you don't ever have to think about DDR3.
Huh?
Memory that is embedded in GPUs.
They don't use DDR at all, the datacenter ones use HBM (I think 3 or 4 now) and normal GPUs use GDDR7 or 6/X but GDDR is not the same as DDR and we could even have GDDR8 before DDR6.
You're technically correct. The best kind of correct. Thanks.
I got my new gaming laptop during black friday sales, a few weeks before the AIpocalypse started. The exact laptop I got then is now 400 euro more!
Don't forget storage prices now too and not just NVMe drives. I can't wait for this AI hoarding to finally fucking crash. It's like the mining shit we had with GPUs in steroids. Ugh.
You don't have to play current gen AAA games. They are crazy expensive anyway.
And generally not very high quality.
PS5 was too much day one at £400 and it's only gone up since. What happened to the days of sub-£200 consoles later in their lifespan?
AI datacenters and greed.
We're also losing the ability to shrink our transistors at this point, so the things that made old tech cheaper before don't really apply anymore.
Hopefully at least competition can catch up. It would be great to have competitive manufacturing capacity here in the EU rather than depend on global trade (Looks at Unprecedented Event Of The Month)
From what I've learned on Economics Explained, I don't think it's something that necessarily leads to better outcomes than global trade, beyond just redundancy. Competitive manufacturing relies on low costs, which relies on low wages, which favors countries where there aren't thriving sectors of the economy that pay better than manufacturing. And even once that country is favored, it brings in more money, which leads to higher salaries, raising the quality of living, and eventually making the factory jobs non-viable in that country either. If I didn't get anything in the above incorrect, I believe that's called the middle income trap.
Current gen (TSMC 2nm) is like 50% more dense than the last one and I do believe the next generation will still be a huge leap forward, but we unfortunately don't know what's going to happen beyond that one. A few more generations and silicon's atomic size might become an issue, which is WILD.
I think the problem might sort itself out once the data centers are actually built. The impact from maintaining a data center is probably less than from actually building one.
If they allowed to build all the data centers around me, hardware be less of our issues. We want have any water left in our homes. They literally trying to build 26 of these fucking water draining things in our area.
No it’s gonna suck. Those data centers will consume fresh water and power driving up costs of both over the long term.
The chips will also become obsolete or will degrade over time. After 7 years they will require replacement. Same is true with memory and ram.
It’s never going to end.
Increased demand translates to increased memory and ram production capacity?
In a world where inputs to the process of chip creation can scale you would be correct.
However it takes at least a decade to bring a power plant online restrict power generation. Access to natural gas and oil can be distrupted further restricting access to power. There is a finite supply of water in most areas that can not be expanded . Disruption to trade routes due to war and tariffs make expanding the inputs to production difficult. Reduces access to capital due to a lack of faith in the US government and rising interest rates will restrict that access.
The world of plenty we lived in was dying even before Covid killed it off. We live in a world of scarcity and disrupted supply and resources now.
Yes and no. Production capacity takes a long time to build up in manufacturing. Plus these are specialized parts so the build up will take longer. Don't expect a significant production capacity increase in the US for 5-10 years.
Didn't one of the 3 memory manufacturers specifically say they're not going to be raising production as they'd rather have everyone pay the premiums while the shortage lasts?
When the Chinese DRAM industry really kicks off, we'll have competition again. But right now they're not producing high enough volumes and the Chinese RAM sticks on Aliexpress (yes, the ones with actually Chinese DRAM chips) aren't much cheaper than non-Chinese RAM.
Oracle depreciates them over 7 years to cook the books for better financial reports. They're apparently generally replaced after 3-4 because individual GPUs start failing and the next generation's improved performance and power consumption will make them obsolete anyway.
They're essentially throwaway hardware as they can't really be resold and repurposed for gaming either despite all that glorious VRAM. They only do compute.
Capitalism
This is becoming my default position for so many things now it's ridiculous.
My Xbox One was not worth $500 at all, ever during its lifespan. My Series X is solely a 360 Pro. I think I'm done with these. How the mighty have fallen.
Well this may be the final push for me to stop getting new consoles and fully switch to my pc and steamdeck with a little bit of switch on the side
Me, except at this point my PC will be a Steam Machine with Steam Deck, and Switch 2 on the side.
Maybe we’re not quite there yet but I got some dice and miniatures that don’t need ram or internet…
Flash games should run on a pi zero, not sure about modern browser gaming.
We won't be "there" for a while hopefully (short of a grid-destroying crisis but we'll have far bigger problems then and no time for gaming anyway) but some off-screen time is good for our health (and less use of electronics makes them last longer).
At that price, just buy or build a fucking computer already.
Not anymore. Same thing's driving prices on both sides.
Ram is short Storage is short Video ram is shorter
The newest consoles outside the switch are just pc's with different opperating systems.
I bet the next big thing to be released is a ps6-lite for $399 that's just a terminal with a $50 a month rental fee to a cloud gaming provider, game licenses not included.
They know that by the time they release, a gaming pc will cost twice as much.
Can't slowly upgrade a PS5 into a PS6 though.
You can on PC.
Let alone the massive backlog of previous generation games and emulators that you don't need a top line PC for.
I'd rather find an android device than buy a next gen console. These things are DOA if they are over $1k. Going to be wild if Linux paves the way for modern gaming.
Pc parts aren't cheap either...
However your options are much better when you're building a PC with a $1000 budget.
Half of that will go towards RAM
1000 for a PC? Are you mad? With the prices going up it would be miracle to pay 1000, if you find ram or cheap HDD/SSD.
Nahh $1500 is the entry price at this point.
For now. This bubble will burst.
Hmm let's see..
Total 850 EUR and you are left with 150-200 for games or hdd or rainbow cables if you are into that stuff.
Needless to say SSD and RAM prices suck.
Note: $1000 + 20% VAT is roughly 1050 EUR
Aren't you forgetting a GPU there?
Nope, you roll with iGPU.
I actually have the same igpu as is in 8700G in my laptop (ryzen 7840U), probably somewhat nerfed as it's a mobile cpu. To be honest I did not expect that I will be playing Diablo 4 on it.
But sure, you can squeeze in a GPU if you cheap out on some other stuff or buy used parts. Like the laptop I mentioned above - used HP Elitebook for about €750. Hands down the cheapest a the best laptop I ever bought. And "unfortunately " far more gaming capable than I thought.
Good try, but as the other user said, you forgot the GPU.
200 euro for 16G? Youre sure there chief? :p
They start at 220 and quickly go towards 270 hehe
(God i hate the market atm)
DDR4?
With an amd 8000 series? Ye no, thats am5. Ddr5
That means you're leaving like 60-70 for a case + mouse + keyboard if you get even a moderately good PSU (which you should, because fuck having a shit PSU kill other components). It's a bit tight IMO.
Also this leaves you with no dedicated GPU, meaning the gaming experience will be far inferior to a console. It will of course be more useful in everything else.
I don‘t think people who can‘t cough up 1000 bucks for a console will cough them up for a PC. They just don‘t have that kinda money to spend on videogames. It‘ll lead to people stickin with what they have and those who don‘t have anything (especially kids) will play games on their phones or doomscroll all day. So the whole next gen might be crossgen and/or even tank the industry in general. That‘s my prediction.
The good thing about a PC is that it can be used for more things than video games. A lot more, in fact. I constantly use my PC for work because I'm too cheap to buy a proper work laptop yet (before anyone gets up in arms, I'm self employed, there's no boss to ask for things). I use the same PC to pirate media because fuck paying 5 different subscriptions and still not seeing the movies you want to see. And I also use it to browse the Internet on a screen of actual size.
So you're saying you are failing to provide your most crucial employee with appropriate work equipment? /j
Well the lazy bastard has been working like 40 hours a month for the last half a year saying something about season affective disorder and ADHD!
Oof.
But it is possible to pick up a cheap used office PC off ebay and stick a used GPU in it, which would let someone play almost any game on the market for much less than a console.
Just gonna throw this out there; If you've never had a Nintendo Wii, I'd genuinely recommend picking one up and modding it.
My last console was a PS3, after that I went exclusively PC since every newer console seemed far too expensive for the very few exclusives that interested me, and they began to charge a monthly fee to play games online. The only console I didn't have from that generation was the Wii, as I'd always written it off as a gimmick. But after taking a closer look at its library, it's surprisingly packed with good titles, and the motion controls are a pretty unique way to interact with games.
I picked one up a few months ago off ebay, and even for a lot that included a Wii balance board, it was less than $80. Modding it was extremely easy, and after it was done, I was amazed to find that it has access to a surprisingly polished online homebrew store full of emulators and cool little homebrew games that download and install with a single click.
That means the console has access to:
All for less than $100. It's an absolute gem of a console, especially when paired with sailing the high seas (which is really easy since the Wii has an SD card slot, so you can slam it full of stuff), and has quickly become my favorite of all time. I sold every other console I've ever owned, but I suspect I'll be keeping the Wii for the foreseeable future due to its versatility and ease of use (especially for retro games, no messing around with RetroArch's horrible interface!)
As somebody who manages a piece of software often used in wii modding: ye, do it! Mod a wii :p
But seriously, the ps3/wii/x360 era were the last gen where the hardware design was rather simple and easy to understand, making it fun to play with and learn. The wiiu ended up with a bootrom making it harder and way more complex to run your own stuff on it ( outside of wii-mode and non-system menu stuff ). Then the switch was a whole new level (and we got lucky there with the bootrom exploit).
Switch added secure bootrom, executable validation, firmware blobs, no-execute memory flags, dedicated crypto hardware in cpu with it's own firmware, more secure mmu mapping, ...
Even if you had raw access you still needed to implement some stuff just get hardware even going.
Xbox Series S is also great for modding too. Wii U is nice for modding too IMO.
I guess it’s finally time to tackle my backlog.
Personally I don’t need better graphics, PS4/PS5 level is already great. Developers can do pretty much everything they can imagine.
I’m for cheaper, more accessible hardware.
I wonder who they're trying to sell these to. Back in 2002 the Xbox cost 480e and it was already very expensive. The 360 was cheaper at release already (400e). Fast forward 25 years, salaries are the same and hardware costs... double? The math doesn't work out
Where are salaries the same? With your jlai.lu domain I would've thought you're French, in which case they haven't really doubled since France was already a well-off western nation, but close enough
(using 2001 as the starting point since you did say fast forward 25 years)
Now in a country like mine, things are different. From 300-400 EUR per month average in 2001 (minimum being even lower), to over 2000 in 2025 (pre-tax numbers here, the French ones in the graph are post-tax). The new generation consoles are far more affordable even with their current price hike because you don't have to save up for years to buy one and then save up several months to buy a single game.
It's true, minimum wage seems to have doubled : https://la-paie-facile.com/evolution-smic/
I should have looked this up
Where I live, it only has had a 40% increase, but that is an exception :
https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F2300
I guess the bigger question that comes from this, is do I go with a Steamdeck or with a Legion 2?
A follow up would be, do I wait for the Steamdeck 2
If you're looking into that, it might be worth considering some of the Android portable like the AYN Thor.
While they are usually focused on console emulation, on the more powerful units you can run older windows titles on them via emulation as well as any native android stuff you feel like running. The battery life of anything ARM beats the hell out of anything x86. There are also form factors available worlds better than the Legion or Steamdeck if you actually want something you can carry around in a pocket.
The aforementioned AYN Thor is about the size and form factor of a 3DS and retails for $250 for the cheapest model. So if you're looking for something to tide you over until you can get a full gaming PC/Gabecube/Steamdeck 2, it might be better "half measure" than a Legion or Steamdeck.
Legion for the mouse integration alone, IMO.
That'd be quite high compared to historical inflation-adjusted launch prices.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/game-console-launch-prices-adjusted-for-inflation-1975-2024/
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/995e4917-5bb0-4dee-8b7d-f43e8ef21d62.webp
Weren't Saturn and PS1 the same price at release? Or am I misremembering
May as well give it 9999 HP , wasnt buying it anyway but would not even consider it at those prices.
This news coming on the back of the Switch 2 sales suffering is certainly one of the decisions of all time.
searches
https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-switch-2-production-cut-33-following-weak-holiday-sales-report-claims
I know the topic is prices increasing due to scarcity of parts, but Nintendo should have expected exactly that outcome when they started subsidising the Japan-only consoles with higher prices elsewhere...
We must be reaching a plateau in terms of generational leaps in between consoles. Though I love the PS5 it's not a huge jump from PS4, just slightly better graphics and better frame rates. As things stand, I can't see a need to upgrade for years. PS5 it's only 6 years old. It's easily got another 6, maybe 10 years in it.
I've been complaining that the consoles and graphical fidelity have been seeing diminishing returns since the PS3 / Xbox 360. At this point, we're just pushing way more power for minimal improvements. It's stupid.
It's amazing to see what they squeezed out of the PS3 and Xbox 360 towards the end of their life compared to the launch titles. It feels like there was not much of an improvement over the life span of the PS4. The PS5 has ray tracing, but apart from that it doesn't look much different from the PS4. I suppose framerates are higher now.
Yeah for sure, "better" from here on out will have to involve better features.
I had the same opinion, but it changed after playing Doom (2016, Xbox One) and Doom Eternal (2020, Xbox Series X) back to back. The difference was dramatic.
I still believe we are reaching a point where Moore's law is hitting a fundamental limit, but only time will tell how things will pan out. My guess is that consoles will need to get bigger to get better.
The biggest difference i noticed was that they changed it from an FPS to a rhythm game with an FPS coating.
Demon Patapon.
Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, just different.
I dunno, I actually thought Doom 2016 mostly looked better than Eternal. I didn't like Eternal's more cartoony bright color highlights everywhere. Admittedly though, it probably didn't look great on the XBOne. probably like 720 or 900p.
I mean…those are not prices the market will pay so I guess rip console market?
I seriously wonder if they'd be better off just deferring the next console generation until 2028.
There was 9 years between the release of the 360 and the Xbox One. Might was well do the same thing this generation.
The second video game crash....
Im hoping independent developers fill the void. Honestly they already are. Haven't the last couple of big sellers been FAR from AAA?
All this to play PS4 Remasters on one and PC games on the other
Didnt xbox say they are quitting the hardware side of things?
No, they said it would run PC games.
Whether that means Steam remains to be seen.
Steam would make ZERO sense.
I agree, from MS point of view.
But people around here were very excited a few weeks back when it got announced, and were convinced it means they'll be able to play their Steam libraries on it.
Shows you the average consumer IQ.
Hope they know, you don't have to launch a console every half dozen years. Could just hold off and y'know, not for a while. A long while.
I know it's because I'm getting old, but it seems like PS5 just came out. But part of it too is diminishing returns on tech advances. The difference is more and more negligible every gen. And that's for AAA; for most developers on real-world budgets, I doubt many are even hitting console power bottlenecks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_generation_of_video_game_consoles
The eighth generation video game console period ran for about eight years, so there'd be precedent for the ninth generation consoles to do the same, which would take us to a 2028 release date for the tenth generation.
I meam to be fair maybe they should have to eat the stupidity of buying all the hardware stock out there for their ridiculous push for more and more datacenters, if the cost of current gen consoles kept rising years after launch maybe we could get more people on board with regulating AI and being against the idealogy of streaming everything including pcs and games.
Most indie devs end up using tools like unreal engine as they are not developing engines in house like what used to be the case for AAA studios. Hell even most AAA studios end up using unreal as well now do to how good it can look if you have the best hardware out there with minimal effort. This unfortunately means a lot of games run into console power bottlenecks, hell it even is a problem with PC players, some games even run like shit on 5090s. Considering the current gen was sold as supposedly 4k ready gaming systems this over reliance on unreal for its beautiful but severely unoptimized graphical capabilities means a lot of games run like shit on consoles when people are using them attached to 4k tvs like they had been advertised to work well with.
I will say if they didnt push for a next gen though it would benefit all gamers pc and console alike. It would force the devs for these games to start actually optimizing for the hardware out there and realize they dont need to turn on every bell and whistle in unreal to make a fun game. It would be so nice if games could go back to using reasonable minimum specs. There isnt a need to have photorealistic graphics if only a handful of people can even run your game, the gameplay is much more important as is having a stable framerate. Not to mention games before nannite, ray tracing, etc all looked phenomenal anyways once a little tlc was put into crafting the shaders and textures, if we took a step back from all the excess now we would have games looking amazing and performing great on all variations of hardware.
I will not pay $1000 for a console alone. I would buy a gaming PC for 4x that first. And I’m exactly their target market.
No.
Keeping my Xbox X as long as it runs. It took me until 2 years ago to spend the money on this one
Considering Playstation is likely to have all of Xbox's exclusives, I'm surprised Xbox is going forward with their console. It feels like another Xbox One disaster.
Well, time to whip out the old Red Ring machine.
I have to say, I honestly can't tell the difference between my Xbox One vs my series X. I wish I hadn't upgraded
One of them has a 5400 RPM HDD and the other an NVMe SSD. You can't tell me the Series X still takes half an hour to boot up and another half an hour to launch a game?
I still use a One. I've had it for over ten years now. Load times keep getting longer for anything that constantly updates. Those games also keep getting laggier online, too. I'm not sure if hardwiring would make it better, but I've never had it hardwired before.
I am still kinda surprised Xbox is still doing hardware at all
While pre builds will still be 1200 - consoles are looking to either kill themselves or hand everything over to Nazitendo with their ban policies.
I'm hoping Nintendo is soon after. Nintendo is without question the worst among the 3 hardware developers. Behind their child friendly IP's they're the most cut throat company. They're the epitome of you'll own nothing and like it