Sony PS6, Microsoft neXt Series - 10th gen console speculation [2020]

[Shifty Geezer]

'Distribution' meaning the license database and, in software, one could easily create the capacity for licenses to be traded and swapped just as physical items are. The only thing preventing this and requiring wasteful physical items to be used over versatile software is a lack of interest from the platform holders. AFAIK the EU is considering forcing digital licenses to be considered the same as physical licenses. This would forced the ability for licenses to be traded and render hardware dongles moot.

 

[Charlietus]

'Distribution' meaning the license database and, in software, one could easily create the capacity for licenses to be traded and swapped just as physical items are. The only thing preventing this and requiring wasteful physical items to be used over versatile software is a lack of interest from the platform holders. AFAIK the EU is considering forcing digital licenses to be considered the same as physical licenses. This would forced the ability for licenses to be traded and render hardware dongles moot.

As you already have said, this isn't going to happen unless government regulation steps in. Which is going to require years for such a big change.

Until then, physical with the negative that you have to download the game is an acceptable compromise.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Until then, physical with the negative that you have to download the game is an acceptable compromise.

And such a card only needs a basic NFC ROM chip or something. Doesn't need an entire optical disk nor SD card.

 

[Riddlewire]

100GB blue ray discs look pretty expansive. I'm sure that Sony gets them at a cheaper price, but it's probably still at around 10-15€ a disc.

When you pay for pressed discs a few million at a time, I'm betting the cost is a fraction of that. DVDs were only US $0.08 per disc at maturity. Same basic process, just with different materials and tolerances.

 

[Charlietus]

When you pay for pressed discs a few million at a time, I'm betting the cost is a fraction of that. DVDs were only US $0.08 per disc at maturity. Same basic process, just with different materials and tolerances.

I'd expect that the profit margin per disc sold to the public isn't more than 50%, so at 20€ per disc for a single user, maybe Sony pays around 10€?

I can't see discs being sold for 20€ with a production cost of 2€.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'd expect that the profit margin per disc sold to the public isn't more than 50%, so at 20€ per disc for a single user, maybe Sony pays around 10€?

I can't see discs being sold for 20€ with a production cost of 2€.

Why? Watch batteries are sold at a few dollars on a cost of maybe 20 cents to the retailer and a production cost of half a cent for the producer. Price to the consumer is set at what they will pay maximal to the price/revenue curve. BRDs might well have 99% profit margins, but lowering the price won't move more units (people preferring digital) to offset the reduced revenue per unit. It's the same reason in game cosmetics that cost effectively nothing to produce are charged at $20 instead of 50c. You'd sell many more at 50c, but not 40x more to make it more profitable to sell at the lower price.

 

[Charlietus]

Why? Watch batteries are sold at a few dollars on a cost of maybe 20 cents to the retailer and a production cost of half a cent for the producer. Price to the consumer is set at what they will pay maximal to the price/revenue curve. BRDs might well have 99% profit margins, but lowering the price won't move more units (people preferring digital) to offset the reduced revenue per unit. It's the same reason in game cosmetics that cost effectively nothing to produce are charged at $20 instead of 50c. You'd sell many more at 50c, but not 40x more to make it more profitable to sell at the lower price.

I can't find any article on the internet that states the production costs of a 100gb blue ray, only that 5 years ago, on 25gb blue rays, the cost was around 4 dollars (maybe). I could see, with inflation, higher capacities and costs, that right now it could cost double of that.

So maybe around 8€? Who knows.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Production costs may also have increased due to less demand.

 

[Charlietus]

https://bsky.app/profile/thegamebusiness.com/post/3ln3vihapb226

Physical is still a big part of the market. When you see that 85% of the market is digital, that includes all games on digital stores against the few physical games that are available on retail. Always a flawed comparison.

This puts Sony in a difficult position. Either they make the portable digital only, maintaining discs only for the home console, of they abandon discs in favor of something that can be inserted in both a portable and a home console.

 

[raytracingfan]

AFAIK the EU is considering forcing digital licenses to be considered the same as physical licenses. This would forced the ability for licenses to be traded and render hardware dongles moot.

This would be a massive sucker punch to the already declining pay once-to-play monetization model and incentivize publishers to go with F2P + MTX, subscribe-to-play, or making their games available exclusively through Game Pass-style subscription services.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I agree. But that's also what was being faced with physical and the second hand market. It was digital sales which offset that and allowed things to continue as they are. Just before that paradigm shift, we had the likes of MS's XBO licensing plans, and Sony patenting optical discs with a single-use license code embedded. The whole industry was feeling the pain of second-hand sales and was trying to find a solution.

However, that's moot for the discussion. If the value of physical is trading games, physical is not needed for that and it could be achieved in software. The impact of a resurgence of game trading is a different discussion, although if one is against that, one ought to be against physical game trading.

 

[thicc_gaf]

Yes. I don't think it worked as a strategy then, and you suggest as much. Doubt it'll work now also. Oddly, if bonkers tariffs are applied to consoles, PC will take off in a big way in the US as consoles will just be too pricy. And that would encourage a non-Windows OS, which might see a wider PC revolution. Which might greatly affect what next gen consoles can and will be.

If it goes down that way , I guess Steam OS is currently poised to capitalize upon it the best. But it's also got me wondering how will SIE & Nintendo (but ATM, particularly SIE) focus on addressing that. SIE in the past have said multiple times they don't see PC as a competing platform: IMO they're either lying or are increasingly short-sighted.

I think you can look at what's happened in markets like Japan as evidence there is some notable degree of competition between console (specifically PlayStation) and PC for gaming, when you see the stagnation of the former (mainly due to decrease in PlayStation market share gen-over-gen) and growth of the latter (3x increase from 5% to 15.3% in a 3-4 year time span since this gen's started). Which to me signals not only have PS5 physical software sales generally been on the steep decline in Japan, but digital sales aren't great either otherwise I think we'd of seen some growth of the console segment there at the very least.

Personally I do think eventually SIE (and to lesser extent Nintendo, but in their case it's not as immediate an issue) will need to expand the value proposition of their gaming hardware because the market opportunity for wholly dedicated gaming consoles could contract heavily. I've talked about SIE "PCfying" PlayStation but in the context of closer to classic microcomputers i.e Amiga, FM Towns, Sharp X68000 etc. rather than IBM-compatible PCs (for obvious reasons, such as to avoid running Windows and to still retain some closed ecosystem in terms of the OS). Originally I thought that'd be something to start considering with PS7, but with the way things are playing out between PC gaming growth, tariffs, price increases etc. I kind of feel it's something they may have to consider doing with PS6 at some point TBH.

I mean, they need a way to offer more value proposition (regardless how things progress with their multiplatform strategy) and easily justify these generally higher prices. Just prettier graphics and faster frames isn't going to be enough, especially if pricing trends this gen continue into the next.

The "Xbox PC" vision points in exactly this direction.

It does, in theory. But in practice I think Valve are a few leagues ahead of them in terms of practical solutions of a "consolized PC" gaming future. Steam Deck actually exists; the Xbox handheld is still years away and the ASUS one just sounds like another Windows handheld PC with a light games wrapper for some UI elements. Valve can apply what works with Steam Deck towards another iteration of Steam Machines, and now they're reaching out to partner with OEMs who will help greatly with volume scaling & retail distribution of Steam-compatible hardware products. The only things from there Valve'd really need to improve are coordinated mass-market advertising media operations.

Microsoft in theory have their console experience, but I'd say most of the people who were responsible for the bright spots (OG Xbox & early 360) are gone, and that's the particular console experience that'd actually had been beneficial for this Xbox PC shift. Windows just keeps getting bogged down with bloat code and features that power users hate alongside will interfere with a smooth gaming experience. The AI gaming demonstrations show promise for future technological applications, but the current examples are absolutely horrendous.

It will be ironic if Trump's tariffs do more to kill the console walled garden business model than the EU's Digital Markets Act does.

I'd really, REALLY hate if "that" was the main culprit (the tariffs or related things). The EU DMA, AFAIK, was mainly aimed at smartphone markets; I don't think there's ever been much grounds for its application into the home gaming space. Game consoles aren't life necessity devices.

 

[thicc_gaf]

100% doesnt matter, Sony didnt look at the PC space in 2018-2019 and say hmm less than half of consumer PCs have SSDs let alone NVMe, we should maybe we go with SATA in 2020. They looked at what developers were requesting(higher disk throughput possibly SATA SSDs) + a 7-8 year life cycle and decided to go with the fastest NVMe SSDs available on the market by 2020. More than what developers had requested. This is whats completely missing in your analysis. Sony's going to double the memory because its the min requirement for a next gen console that has to last 7-8 years. Its really that simple.
Going with 7nm + NVMe SSDs was very costly but only for the first few months. in about 6 months the PS5 was already profitable, within a year the price of SSDs had dropped. Today Sony's PS5 pro consoles are on 4nm while the base is on 6nm.

The 9th gen possibly had the least room for innovation moving from one gen to the other. It wasnt quite clear what paradigm shift was required wrt the silicon so you saw more of an emphasis on disk throughput since that was the most neglected part of console designs. From 9th to 10th its very evident, accelerators for Ray tracing and Machine Learning along with the memory enhancements+optimizations to feed those accelerators. Adding these accelerators without at least doubling memory bandwidth and memory would be a complete waste of silicon.

https://imgur.com/a/U5qiRK9

That is whats going to be the main talking point for the PS6 they will harp on about the memory, and about how it creates photorealistic worlds indistinguishable from reality and how the machine uses custom Raytracing and AI hw. And you think they're going to skimp on memory??

It's really about being smart and doing more with less. If they're smart and employ things like more effective PNM or PIM, better data compression algorithms and such into the memory subsystem, a 8 GB jump from this gen to 10th could match or exceed the 2x raw memory capacity jump we saw from 8th gen to 9th. It could even approach the type of jump we saw going from 7th gen to 8th, which was a raw 16x capacity increase (I say approach, as in the types of performance increases, even if not actually hitting that level).

Just really depends on what improvements are brought to the memory subsystems. All things considered, SIE (led by Cerny) did things with the I/O subsystem in PS5 that had some major improvements over the 8th gen; I'd expect they know next gen might need that type of approach to the dynamic memory arrangement so they'll find a great balance there if people like Cerny are present. I'm less certain if Microsoft would provide quite the same type of thing but considering they're trying to PC-ize Xbox these days, they could simply go with more memory capacity than what PS6 brings (especially if they also facilitate upgradable memory).

https://bsky.app/profile/thegamebusiness.com/post/3ln3vihapb226

Physical is still a big part of the market. When you see that 85% of the market is digital, that includes all games on digital stores against the few physical games that are available on retail. Always a flawed comparison.

This puts Sony in a difficult position. Either they make the portable digital only, maintaining discs only for the home console, of they abandon discs in favor of something that can be inserted in both a portable and a home console.

Is it feasible they can simply have the portable use the PS5 external disc drive and press cheaper discs to act as codes or store some of the game data while also enabling download of additional data the way the Switch 2 Game Key cards do?

As for the discs, is it possible they could simply use cheaper DVD-ROMs or CD-ROMs? Most blu-ray drives are BC with DVD, but I don't know the specifics of that or what exceptions there would be among different player types. The external drive should support DVDS, same as the regular PS5's drive, and DVD discs would be cheaper to manufacture. Since games need to install to local storage anyway, it doesn't really matter if the DVD is slower than BR, just that it holds enough of the game data.

So one where the disc is just a key can use a single-layer DVD, ones with more game data (but not too much more) using multi-layer DVDs. As an example does a game only 15 GB in size really need a BR disc? Just give a quad-layer DVD; the data still has to be copied to the SSD anyway. For the portable it would mean physical's only an option when portability is mostly limited, but at least there's an option.

Truth is not every country's got great internet and not every person in a given country's got "fair" internet i.e access to a good high-speed provider who doesn't do data caps or terrible speed throttling. They can't go digital-only because in those locations they're effectively alienating a sizable chunk of the potential audience.

 

[Charlietus]

It's really about being smart and doing more with less. If they're smart and employ things like more effective PNM or PIM, better data compression algorithms and such into the memory subsystem, a 8 GB jump from this gen to 10th could match or exceed the 2x raw memory capacity jump we saw from 8th gen to 9th. It could even approach the type of jump we saw going from 7th gen to 8th, which was a raw 16x capacity increase (I say approach, as in the types of performance increases, even if not actually hitting that level).

Just really depends on what improvements are brought to the memory subsystems. All things considered, SIE (led by Cerny) did things with the I/O subsystem in PS5 that had some major improvements over the 8th gen; I'd expect they know next gen might need that type of approach to the dynamic memory arrangement so they'll find a great balance there if people like Cerny are present. I'm less certain if Microsoft would provide quite the same type of thing but considering they're trying to PC-ize Xbox these days, they could simply go with more memory capacity than what PS6 brings (especially if they also facilitate upgradable memory).



Is it feasible they can simply have the portable use the PS5 external disc drive and press cheaper discs to act as codes or store some of the game data while also enabling download of additional data the way the Switch 2 Game Key cards do?

As for the discs, is it possible they could simply use cheaper DVD-ROMs or CD-ROMs? Most blu-ray drives are BC with DVD, but I don't know the specifics of that or what exceptions there would be among different player types. The external drive should support DVDS, same as the regular PS5's drive, and DVD discs would be cheaper to manufacture. Since games need to install to local storage anyway, it doesn't really matter if the DVD is slower than BR, just that it holds enough of the game data.

So one where the disc is just a key can use a single-layer DVD, ones with more game data (but not too much more) using multi-layer DVDs. As an example does a game only 15 GB in size really need a BR disc? Just give a quad-layer DVD; the data still has to be copied to the SSD anyway. For the portable it would mean physical's only an option when portability is mostly limited, but at least there's an option.

Truth is not every country's got great internet and not every person in a given country's got "fair" internet i.e access to a good high-speed provider who doesn't do data caps or terrible speed throttling. They can't go digital-only because in those locations they're effectively alienating a sizable chunk of the potential audience.

They could probably use a CD to act as an equivalent to the switch 2 game key cards. I don't see any technical limitations for that.

Using CD instead of blue rays... It already takes a fair amount of time to transfer data for the disc to the SSD. You'd need hours if you used a slower format.

As for using the disc drive for the portable, I don't see how that's feasible. It has a proprietary connector, it doesn't have a USB or something like that, so how would it connect to the portable?

As for the internet accessibility problem, in an ideal world companies should still offer options for games on discs without downloads. In reality, it's going to be a problem.

 

[rntongo]

It's really about being smart and doing more with less. If they're smart and employ things like more effective PNM or PIM, better data compression algorithms and such into the memory subsystem, a 8 GB jump from this gen to 10th could match or exceed the 2x raw memory capacity jump we saw from 8th gen to 9th. It could even approach the type of jump we saw going from 7th gen to 8th, which was a raw 16x capacity increase (I say approach, as in the types of performance increases, even if not actually hitting that level).

Next gen architecture is about efficiently meeting demands of future workloads not "doing more with less". Sony doesnt base console specs on consumer PC averages, it makes forward looking bets 100% based on developer needs over a 7-8 year console cycle. Respectfully what you've proposed wouldnt be smart since you cant just plug and play PNM and PIM into a memory controller. You're comparing PNM(Persistent Memory) and PIM(Processing In Memory) which are enterprise side academic technologies with no proven and viable deployment, no driver stack, no compiler runtime support in gaming consoles. Even if you managed to incorporate these systems, you still wouldnt negate the need for higher physical memory capacity and bandwidth when it comes to feeding real-time graphics pipelines and AI inference engines for next gen silicon and workloads. You'd end up increasing the latency along the memory hierarchy by incorporating such an additional layer. IIRC Xbox One base console added embedded SRAM(ESRAM) as a cache between the GPU and DRAM, with a theoretical 204GB/s of memory bandwidth. But this was a disaster in practice with developers only having about 68GB/s usable due to inconsistent performance. Sony's simpler 8GB of GDDR5(176GB/s) with higher memory bandwidth outperformed the theoretical (204GB/s) memory bandwidth on the base Xbox One without a need for OS and SDK level optimizations, and no need for extra developer work. Simple wide physical memory won out over complex theoretical workarounds. Thats the smart precedent here.

It's really about being smart and doing more with less. If they're smart and employ things like more effective PNM or PIM, better data compression algorithms and such into the memory subsystem, a 8 GB jump from this gen to 10th could match or exceed the 2x raw memory capacity jump we saw from 8th gen to 9th. It could even approach the type of jump we saw going from 7th gen to 8th, which was a raw 16x capacity increase (I say approach, as in the types of performance increases, even if not actually hitting that level).

The hw compression was present on both PS5 and Series X and was fixing bottlenecks between the disk to memory. The hw blocks decompressed data between the SSD and RAM and not during active execution in the unified physical memory pool. Once you have the data resident in memory the decompression is done. So you have full uncompressed high resolution textures, AI states, BVH structures, etc. Improving compression ratios will not compensate for physical memory shortfalls if anything it only necessitates higher physical memory to take advantage of better compression ratios. On top of that you still have a need for higher memory bandwidth for Real Time RayTracing like Path tracing, virtualized simulations, ML hw accelerated upscalers like PSSR. And this is just the baseline for flagship AAA titles for a system supposed to run from 2028-2035/6. There's just no way around doubling RAM and memory bandwidth.

Just really depends on what improvements are brought to the memory subsystems. All things considered, SIE (led by Cerny) did things with the I/O subsystem in PS5 that had some major improvements over the 8th gen; I'd expect they know next gen might need that type of approach to the dynamic memory arrangement so they'll find a great balance there if people like Cerny are present. I'm less certain if Microsoft would provide quite the same type of thing but considering they're trying to PC-ize Xbox these days, they could simply go with more memory capacity than what PS6 brings (especially if they also facilitate upgradable memory).

Again you're looking at the improvements to disk throughput while I was talking about the memory requirements not disk. Yes Cerny with Kraken and Oodle and Andrew Goossen at MS with BCPack were right to prioritize I/O throughput. That was the biggest bottleneck moving from 8th to 9th gen. Now its back to memory and compute. ML upscaling, BVH traversal for Path Tracing are both computational and memory intensive. If Sony includes larger silicon blocks for these hw accelerators on top of hw acceration for traditional Rasterization without at least doubling of memory and memory bandwidth, then they'll have underutilized silicon. And as I mentioned earlier that wouldnt be smart engineering but very similar to the Xbox One ESRAM bottleneck but actually worse in this case. For the kind of hw they plan on creating, physical memory doubling is a necessity.

 

[rntongo]

lmao if Sony doesnt double the amount of RAM going from PS5 to PS6 I'm cooked.

 

[Charlietus]

lmao if Sony doesnt double the amount of RAM going from PS5 to PS6 I'm cooked.

Why would you be cooked personally?

 

[rntongo]

Why would you be cooked personally?

lmao because I have spoken so authoritatively about it being the case, it wont be a good look if it doesnt turn out to be true. There's a chance they wont double the physical RAM but thats what I think is technically most likely and financially most sound for the aforementioned reasons I posted above.

 

[Charlietus]

lmao because I have spoken so authoritatively about it being the case, it wont be a good look if it doesnt turn out to be true. There's a chance they wont double the physical RAM but thats what I think is technically most likely and financially most sound for the aforementioned reasons I posted above.

I'm not saying that 32GB of VRAM are impossible, but ignoring costs, it could end up like the 12GB's of the Xbox One X, which is, mostly unused. Nvidia's low-mid end GPU's feet's are firmly planted on low VRAM amounts, and that's a big chunk of the market. Then you got current gen consoles and Switch 2.

The forward looking bet is probably following in Nvidia's footsteps, and that is, AI hardware to upscale textures and/or reduce VRAM consumption.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

When it comes to memory cost, I wonder how much the rumoured portable might ameliorate concerns. Especially if that same APU finds its way into a PSTV/Series S type device.