ThePS6hasreportedly found its chip manufacturer, opting to go with AMD over Intel. AMD produced the chips for the PS4, PS5, and PS5 Pro, so this isn’t too surprising. In fact, that history wasreportedly a factor in Sony’s decision. PS3 games have long been stranded on that console due to its unique architecture, and the PS6 going with the same manufacturer as Sony’s two most recent consoles will make it easier to support backward compatibility going forward.
The Phone-ification Of Video Game Consoles
That emphasis on backward compatibility makes a lot of sense given what we’ve seen from Sony this generation. Consoles have never felt more like phones, and the move to the PS5 felt less like the exciting whole-new-world moment we often got in the ’90s and ’00s and more like upgrading to a slightly better piece of hardware that provides continuity with your old, slightly worse hardware. I expect to keep my contacts when I get a new iPhone, and I expect to be able to play my old games when I buy a new console.
I wrote recently about how the PS5 was bringing the‘charge more for less’philosophy to games or, to borrow a term from sci-fi author Cory Doctorow, ‘ensh*tification’. That term describes the process by which internet platforms like YouTube, Netflix, and Twitter started out offering a ton for free (or for cheap), but then gradually reduced the quality of the product, while holding the features customers expect ransom behind an ever-increasing paywall.
Remasters, Remakes, And Ports Keep The Games Coming Between New Releases
To keep shareholders happy, PlayStation needs to not only make money, but to make more money each year than it did the year before. For publicly traded companies, the line must always go up. But it’s hard to make greater and greater profits while launching fewer and fewer first-party games. In the PS5’s fourth year, Sony has launched just seven first-party games. One was a remaster (The Last of Us Part 2) and one is no longer available after being pulled from store shelves due to low sales (Concord). That leaves five original first-party games that you may actually play right now.
Compare that to 2009, the fourth year the PS3 was available. That year, Sony published, by my count, 23 games. Or think back to 2003, the fourth year of the PS2’s availability when Sony published 40 games. The trend toward longer development cycles has led to a dearth of new titles, but Sony needs to recoup that lost revenue somehow. In the PS4 era, Sony expanded its subscription offering with monthly free games through PlayStation Plus. In the PS5 era, it expanded PS Plus with multiple tiers, the highest of which includes an ever-expanding library of classic games.
That’s a good deal now, but I suspect that as time goes by and development cycles continue to lengthen, Sony’s old games will play an even bigger role in its business. Remasters like The Last of Us Part 2 are already important parts of Sony’s release calendar. But I also expect a greater emphasis on the Classics Catalog in the next generation. I wouldn’t be surprised if, with the PS6, Sony finally cracks the problem of the PS3’s architecture, allowing a flood of older games to run natively on the hardware.
Barring that, I could see a push to remaster the PS3 games that never got a life outside the console. If you don’t have new games to sell, the next best thing is beloved old games, and the PS4 and PS5 being incompatible with the PS3 has made those games from 2006-2013 feel like something special. Unless game development times radically shorten as publishers and developers embrace smaller games released more frequently, this is the world we’re going to live in. New games will be rarer and rarer. Old games will be the main thing you have to look forward to.
