The PS5's price just went up – but what does it mean for the PS6?

It feels like an age has passed since Sony announced that its prices would be rising pretty much globally across pretty much all the main hardware associated with the PlayStation 5, from the PS5 and PS5 Digital to the PS5 Pro and even the PlayStation Portal.

Tech news progresses at such a pace that there have been plenty of stories since then, but few are bigger than the chunk $100 and £90 price hikes Sony's bringing in with slightly less than a week's notice across its whole lineup. I've already written about how this is objectively terrible news for gamers right now, but there's no escaping the fact that it could also make for a pretty terrible situation for the next console generation.

After all, the PS5 is already five years old, and that normally means it would be time to start wondering when the PS6 might be unveiled. The PS4 lasted for seven years before the PS5 hit the market, and if the PS6 followed that same window, then we'd only be around 18 months away from seeing the console unveiled.

Normally, that would be exciting, and there's no doubt that the hype would build on my side if Sony did drop the news that an unveiling was coming, but there'd be one element that would spell real worry – pricing.

After all, we're now in a situation where the PS5 Pro is going to cost a massive £780 or $900, a nearly unthinkable price just a few years ago, and there's basically no argument that the reason for that price is market forces. Sony isn't willing to sell the console at a loss, and components are now so expensive that it's passing the cost on to customers, rightly or wrongly.

The table of price rises that we've used a few times is still useful for underlining just how big the hikes are around the world:

So, that leads us to a game that's always played in the run-up to any big gaming launch – what will it cost? The PS6 is now likely to launch years into a period of rampant pricing inflation in tech, and it's anyone's guess whether the current demand for memory will have faded away and corrected itself or not.

If it did go back to normal, then you'd assume that Sony would be looking to launch for no more than the £500 mark, one that's traditionally been seen as quite a hard barrier in the minds of most consumers. Now that the PS5 will cost £570 for the foreseeable future, though, it might be more like a £600 mark in reality.

So, if £600 is a more reasonable and likely prediction right now, how does that look to most people in the market? The PS5 was already a somewhat tough sell at launch thanks to a lot of re-releases and cross-generation games, and it would seem the PS6 could well be in for a similar fate.

We've all seen the way graphical leaps have plateaued in the last half-decade, so it would be fascinating to see whether people are willing to countenance that sort of price if they've got a PS5, albeit one that has technically appreciated in value (ridiculously).

My role in tech journalism means I'll always be an early adopter when a new PlayStation rolls around, but £600 would be a steep ask for many of my gaming friends, albeit without knowing at this stage how big the leap in power might be.

Until that's clearer, we'll have to brace ourselves for doom-saying rumours for the next, I'd wager. People smell a story, and the chances of the PS6 having a truly off-putting price clearly just went up quite steeply.