At our place the PS5 showed up embarrassingly late, caught between an eye-watering price tag and stock that never seemed to materialize, while my son and my partner refreshed retailer websites every evening hoping for a restock that kept not coming. Meanwhile, at our beach house, the old PS4 still runs perfectly fine and nobody feels any urge to replace it. So reading that Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki is in no hurry to launch PlayStation 6 didn’t catch me off guard: it fits a way of thinking the company has stuck with for years, and one worth unpacking properly.
What Totoki actually said about the PlayStation 6 release date
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Totoki confirmed the new console still has no fixed launch window, neither internally nor publicly. This isn’t an official delay so much as the absence of any pressure to announce timing before it’s ready. Among the causes he cited are steep component costs and tight memory supply, a problem currently squeezing the entire hardware industry, consoles included.
Why today’s consoles already cost so much
Memory chips aren’t just a future headache. Starting April 2, 2026, Sony raised prices across the current PS5 lineup: the disc edition went from €549.99 to €649.99, the Digital Edition from €499.99 to €599.99, and the PS5 Pro climbed to €899.99. PlayStation Portal rose too, to €249.99. Sony pointed vaguely to “ongoing global economic pressures,” but the real driver is the scramble for RAM chips fueled by demand from AI giants, which has pushed production costs up across the entire supply chain.
The long wait for a PS5, told by someone who lived it
I keep coming back to my own family because it captures the same dynamic Totoki describes from an industry viewpoint. Finding a PS5 at retail price, without paying an absurd markup on some resale site, was a months-long ordeal. Yet none of that frustration dampened anyone’s enthusiasm at home; if anything, the wait made the eventual purchase feel even sweeter. Meanwhile the PS4 left behind at the beach house, a full generation older by now, remains perfectly enjoyable: nobody treats it as junk to toss out, it simply coexists with the newer console depending on where everyone happens to be.
Sony’s real business now lives in content, not hardware
One of the more interesting threads from the interview concerns the Japanese group’s actual priorities. More than two thirds of Sony’s revenue now comes from films, TV shows, music and games, not console sales. Hardware, Totoki hinted, has become a vehicle serving the wider entertainment ecosystem rather than the company’s ultimate goal. It’s no accident that management is eyeing closer ties between anime and games, hoping to repeat the success of cross-media hits like Spider-Man or The Last of Us.
Hype, scarcity and the comparison with Apple’s playbook
Here’s where this gets personal. Hype and scarcity mean every Sony launch turns into an event people wait years for, yet they also let products already on shelves stay relevant for a long stretch, without ever feeling outdated after a single year. I think that’s a smart bet, especially set against the opposite approach taken by the folks in Cupertino, something I already covered when writing about Apple’s price hikes: there, the replacement cycle is built to be constant, almost recursive, with devices designed to feel obsolete long before they actually stop working. Google is no exception either: the Pixel lineup gets refreshed almost every year, leaving owners of earlier models feeling a step behind, even though Google has recently started promising up to seven years of software updates. It’s a pattern that, with different shades, runs across nearly every major player in tech. Sony, for all its own struggles with pricing and supply, seems to be betting instead on longer cycles, where one piece of hardware can sit alongside its successor for years, much like that PS4 at the beach and the PS5 back home.
