"I think we have enough power in the machine. The innovation needs to come not from making PS6 for $1,200 - it's to make another PS5 for $300. Now, that would be true innovation," he explains. Layden's comments are particularly timely right now as the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S are much more expensive today than they were at launch, six years ago. "This is the first platform that I've seen that has gone up in price over time."

As suggested, this is their setup to sell a console that is completely eviscerated and can only function as a thin client for a cloud game streaming service. They know the AI RAM prices are not going down before they need to refresh the PS5, and also that people will not en masse pay $1,000+ for a locked-down digital-only console.

That's the only "innovation" that can result in a $300 or so price, so they hope that will change the optics enough for us to own nothing and like it.

A streaming service would run into the same issue, though. In the end, they would need remote high-end GPUs to power the games which are not going to be available to them cheaply enough to justify.

I think they will try to use older hardware (which would potentially fit the handheld idea) and push studios to design around that. He mentions the iterative nature of games which get more and more graphically intense. I'm assuming the thought is to break away from that.