PS6 Should Fail (And you were never a PlayStation fan if you disagree)
Written by Tom of Moore's Law Is Dead
Oh, What a Year Can Do...
Nearly a year ago, Dustin Furman from Sacred Symbols joined me on Broken Silicon 331 to talk about everything XBOX, PlayStation, Nintendo, and PC Gaming...and a fourth of the episode was spent discussing if there would even be another XBOX. We weren't outliers with that level of worry by the way - go check out how Jez Corden at Windows Central
was talking back then. For context Jez was (and still is) one of the biggest XBOX Fans in gaming journalism - he's the sort of XBOX fan that says things like "XBOX One got too much hate" (Love you Jez!)...and yet a year ago Jez was writing articles like "In its quest for infinite money, Xbox is alienating its fans and everything it once was..." Meanwhile, PlayStation fans were enjoying the (then) exclusive Death Stranding 2, and celebrating recent leaks that PS6 would get a proper handheld edition!
So yeah, for the past few years things have been looking bad for XBOX fans, and good for PlayStation fans. The vibe was so lopsidedly Pro-PlayStation in fact that you literally had people writing articles like "Why I'm hooked on PlayStation and will never get an Xbox"
that concluded their piece by stating "Confidence in the [PlayStation] brand" was why they were done with XBOX. That's not even a real reason - that's just buying something based on a vibe....which means vibes do matter. Vibes make or break console generations just as much as features do. I cannot tell you how many of my friends switched from XBOX 360 to PS4 simply because they "don't trust XBOX". Nobody mentioned Killzone Shadow Fall. Nobody mentioned XBOX One's $500 price point. They just. Didn't. Trust. XBOX. Anymore. ...and that seems to be happening with PlayStation in a very similar way, right now, once again!
Go check twitter. Go check the comments in ANY video post from PlayStation's Official YouTube account in the past month...and then go check the comments responding to any post Asha Sharma, XBOX's CEO, makes on Twitter. Just one year later we have gone from feeling like the PlayStation brand was at the cusp of God-Tier power, and the XBOX brand was tarnished for good...to seemingly the opposite.
The Great Console Vibe Shift of 2026
I believe this month, September of 2026, is the culmination of PlayStation's assent of hubris. I could go month by month, or week by week - but I don't think that's necessary. No, I will just summarize what the PlayStation brand has successfully done in 2026:
The list above is clickable by the way if you, the reader, want to familiarize yourself with the specifics of Sony's recent stupidity, but, either way the point is that this year Sony has basically been doing everything they could do to ruin their relationship with their biggest fans - and that has culminated with the shocking loss of Physint in September of 2026. I feel this event will either mark the peak of their hubris, shame them into realizing they are about to blow the PS6 Generation, and thus trigger the beginning of an appology tour that gets PlayStation back on track before 2027...or it will mark the beginining of a very dark era for the PlayStation brand. It might even be the moment people look back on in the future, and say "that's when we knew PS6 would fail, nobody could defend that mistake."
Furthermore, let me take that last statement a step further - if you are still defending Sony right now, in the middle of September of 2026, you were never a long-term fan of PlayStation.
This is the brand that introduced console support for CDs, Blu-Ray, and other influential forms of affordable physical media. Sony is the Walkman Company. They are synonymous with physical media.
This is the brand that pioneered narrative-driven games by building devices that excelled at running said games better than their competitors devices. Games like like Final Fantasy VII, The Last of Us, and Metal Gear Solid 4.
This is the brand that was once hesitant to charge for online play, fought against XBOX One's plans to remove game ownership and require 24-hour check-in DRM, and even did fun things like promote the revival of Shenmue III at E3 (pure fan service).
If you are supporting PlayStation's latest moves, and you claim to be a long-term fan - who are you? Who is this person that didn't think it was cool the PS3 had a Blu-Ray player, and then also never cared about Sony's big first party single-player games, and yet also never had a problem with giving up ownership and being milked by endles online "innovations"....who is this person who holds all of these opinions...and yet also calls themselves a long-term fan of this brand? I'll tell you who - someone that was never really a fan of anything actually unique about PlayStation in the first place....and thus they were never really fans of PlayStation at all.
PS6 Should Fail
Sony thought their biggest fans would happily surrender game ownership without substantial pushback. Sony thought their studios could successfully milk the same third person gameplay loops endlessly without working on basically any new IPs this generation. Sony thought it was more important to chase free-to-play slop than to properly fund studios like Bluepoint. And most importantly - Sony thought XBOX wouldn't find ways to exploit their weaknesses...and ultimately Sony was very wrong on all of these assumptions. And predictably - ALL of these mistakes were clearly caused by greed.
However the good news is that this greed may finally be the thing that wakes Sony up. You see, I don't think Sony can afford PS6 to have even a mediocre launch, and I bring that up because I am all too often seeing people say things like "it will be like PS3 again, and they'll wake up midway through the generation and then it'll be fine". Wrong. People, PlayStation is NOT what it was in 2006. In 2006 PlayStation was a part of Sony...now it is Sony.
Yes, the PS3 lost Sony tons of money at first - for example in 2007 Sony reported nearly $2B in losses from the PS3 alone...and that was only 2.8% of Sony's corporate revenue for the year. Today, if PlayStation revenue dropped by more than 25% - we are looking at a nearly 10% drop in Sony's total revenue! Usually 5% declines are when corporations start freaking out! So, yeah Sony might not have a mountain of data, yet, to prove that their recent moves will cost the PS6 badly...but if you are an executive at PlayStation - does it feel like PS6 is safe anymore? Saros flopped, Wolverine looks like it will vastly underperform expectations, and PlayStation's ability to market their games on Twitter and YouTube have been neutralized. If I was in charge of PlayStation, I would definitely not feel "safe" going into 2027 at this point. To me it would seem clear that even if our current financials are solid...it feels like our future ones could become tenuous very quickly. That's the vibe. The vibe has clearly shifted, and vibes have killed consoles before.
And on a final note - if Sony doesn't change things up soon, and the PS6 does fail...maybe PS7 will actually be great because of this. I mean look at XBOX fans right now - yes, they were unhappy last year - but this year they seem overjoyed. That wouldn't have happened if Phil Spencer was allowed to get away with turning XBOX into a souless subscription service. In that timeline XBOX would have just continued a managed decline that slowly died in the saddest way possible - a slow, chilling, heat death. A death of apathy. And, if some of the people in charge of running PlayStation this year don't get fired, and Sony doesn't backtrack on some of their worst decisions - the same thing will happen to PlayStation. A managed decline that reaches a heat death within a few generations., And no real fan of PlayStation should want that, and thus all real fans should do everything they can right now to prevent it.
Doubt anyone will see this but pretty good read. I feel that for the casual audience Playsation is depending on — their PS5 a means to an end so they can play games like Fortnite or Call of Duty, I think the casual audience Sony hopes for next generation will be comfortable staying on PS5 or will look elsewhere (looking at Xbox from 360 to the Xbox One). Persistent online backlash and a rumored price of $1000 is more than enough to turn away an audience that was mostly apathetic.