Shawn Layden urges Sony to launch cheaper $300 PS5 instead of $1,200 PS6, Digi Mart USA News: Shawn Layden, the former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, is urging his old employer to stop chasing horsepower and start chasing a lower price tag. Speaking on The Trophy Room podcast, he argued that a cheaper version of the current console would do more for the platform than a more powerful successor.
“The innovation needs to come not from making PS6 for $1,200. It’s to make another PS5 for $300,” Layden said.
“Now, that would be true innovation.”
His argument rests on a simple observation about the current hardware cycle: the PS5 has bucked a tradition that once defined the industry. “This is the first platform that I’ve seen that has gone up in price over time,” he said, recalling that a PlayStation 2 could be had for $99 late in its life.
The PS5 launched in November 2020 with two options: a disc-drive model at $499 and a Digital Edition at $399. A string of increases since then has pushed those figures sharply higher.
Bought directly from PlayStation today, the standard console lists at $649, the Digital Edition at $599 and the PS5 Pro at $899, which is $200 above its original reveal price. Retail channels such as GameStop have gone further still.
Note: Pro figures compare the current price with the price at its reveal rather than the 2020 launch, as the model arrived later in the cycle.
Sony has attributed the increases to “continued pressures in the global economic landscape,” a rationale that has not softened the blow for buyers. Console sales across Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all been under strain.
Layden’s prescription is essentially the reverse of the industry’s usual playbook. Rather than preparing a more expensive future, he would revisit a cheaper past.
“I think if I were in their shoes, that’s what I’d be doing. I’d be trying to find a way to get the cost down on the 5,” he said.
He was blunt about the limits of raw performance as a selling point, saying the current machine already has “enough power.” Asked implicitly about the pitch likely to accompany a next-generation console, he suggested that leaning on “more ray tracing and more teraflops” would miss the point.
“What the company needs to do is do what it’s never done, which is, don’t iterate the console,” he continued. “Make it smaller, make it cheaper, do all the things you can around that, but the silicon’s fine, the OS is fine.
It’s more than enough power to build the kind of games all of us want to play.”
By the industry’s historical cadence, a new PlayStation would be due about now. Sony said in May that it was still weighing when to launch its next console, following a February report that the company was considering a delay to 2028 or even 2029, having previously been expected to target 2027.
Very little about the device has been confirmed. One leaker has claimed that memory and storage alone could cost as much as $680, a figure that reflects the broader surge in component prices.
An October patent filing suggested Sony may be exploring its own approach to frame generation. The company is also contending with a backlash over its decision to end support for physical discs.
Layden’s comments land in a broader debate about what next-generation hardware is for. Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and S trail both the Nintendo Switch 2 and the PS5 lineup in global sales, a shortfall widely attributed to a thin slate of exclusives, though Grand Theft Auto VI is expected to draw players to both platforms when it arrives.
Backward compatibility has become one of Xbox’s clearest advantages, with roughly 4,000 titles from the original Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One playable without a Game Pass subscription.
Sony took a different route. Ahead of the PS5’s launch, former Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan told the Japanese outlet Famitsu that the company had prioritized new technology, including the DualSense controller and SSD storage, and limited compatibility to the PS4.
Older titles are reachable on the PS5 mainly through PS4 re-releases or the PlayStation Plus Classics Catalog, which requires a Premium subscription now priced at $20 a month or $160 a year.
Both platform holders are widely expected to preserve current-generation compatibility in their next machines, a shift that reflects consoles moving closer to PC architecture and away from proprietary parts. The PS5, for instance, pairs AMD Zen 2 silicon with a custom GPU.
The economics Layden describes cut against the industry’s long-standing model, in which hardware costs fall over a generation and a late-cycle budget model expands the installed base. Memory prices have upended that calculus, and if the next PlayStation’s RAM and storage alone approach the cost of today’s console, the machine could land near PC pricing, eroding the main reason consumers buy a dedicated box.
For Sony, the strategic question is whether to defend unit volume with a cheaper PS5 or protect margins with premium hardware. Layden’s view is that the former is the real innovation.
“It’s a hard place to be right now, I think,” he said.
