Even Sony doesn't know when the PS6 is launching

Sony still doesn't have a launch date picked out for the PS6. That's according to CEO Hiroki Totoki, who told The Wall Street Journal that the console's arrival remains undecided internally. It's a notable admission for a console that's been rumored about for a while now.

The PS6 was previously expected to land during the holiday 2027 window, but that timeline looks shakier by the month. Some industry observers now think it could slip all the way to 2028, which happens to be the same year Sony plans to stop producing physical game discs for all new PlayStation titles.

Pricing doesn't look any more settled. Sony has said it won't sell the PS6 at a significant loss, which points toward a price well above the PS5's $500 starting point. Some analysts are worried it could land anywhere from $900 up to $1,000 or more once it actually launches.

Behind most of this sits a global memory shortage some in the industry are calling it RAMageddon. Rising demand for AI data centers has been soaking up DRAM supply, pushing component prices up across the board. Sony says it has enough RAM to keep building PS5 units through March 2027, but all of next year's RAM production has already sold out, which makes planning a PS6 launch that much harder.

To keep costs in check, Sony may end up trimming some of the PS6's specs rather than delaying it outright, such as cutting GDDR7 VRAM from 30GB down to 24GB, or leaning more on file compression to reduce how much fast storage the console actually needs. We'll just have to wait and see how Sony will go about all this.