Next-gen PlayStation and Xbox consoles predicted to be less powerful

Sony's Chief Operating Officer (COO) and president of Sony Group Corporation said during the Q3 2023 earnings report that sales of the PlayStation 5 were slightly disappointing, and that sales targets of the current-gen console had to be revised.

While this may seem irrelevant to next-generation consoles, a part of the reason for sales of the current-gen consoles being slightly disappointing is the cost of the hardware that goes into them. Notably, Sony previously had a sales target of 25 million units for 2023 but had to revise that sales goal down to 21 million units.

Now, Genki Japan filtered this information from Sony into a refined post on X, "Sony COO Totoki said that it is harder to grow profits on the PS5 as the life cycle goes on in comparison to previous generations. With previous gens, as time went on, it became cheaper to produce them. But with PS5, the parts are becoming more expensive as the life cycle goes on."

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This information was followed up by hardware tipster Kepler_L2, who touched on the current situation of the semiconductors and what the prices will look like in the future. "Cost per transistor has remained flat through FinFETs and will go up with GAAFETs/CFETs. The days of free cost savings with die shrinks is over and things will only get worse. Future consoles will either have increasingly smaller performance gains or significantly higher prices."

Distilling the aforementioned information leaves us with Sony being purportedly forced to either reduce the performance uplift of next-generation consoles and keep prices approximately the same or have a proportionate performance increase compared to PS4 to PS5 but significantly increase prices. Only time will tell.