Microsoft is adamant that there’ll be no next generation of consoles until at least Christmas 2028, including both Xbox and PS6.
Even if the pandemic hadn’t happened, and this was just a normal console generation, you still wouldn’t expect to hear about new hardware until at least five years into it. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S have only just turned two years old and yet there’s already been plenty of talk about their successors.
Sony has already implied that they don’t expect to release the PlayStation 6 until after 2027, although the wording was ambiguous enough to give some wriggle room.
Microsoft though has been more explicit, saying that: ‘the next new generation of consoles are not expected to be released before the fall of 2028 at the very earliest.’
In other words, they don’t expect the PlayStation 6 or Xbox Series X successor to be released until at least Christmas 2028, and probably sometime after.
That does make sense given the average length of a generation, and the slow start to this one, but it’s still highly unusual for a new generation of console to have an end date hanging over it. Especially as you’d expect to start hearing new information about the formats a year or two in advance of their launch.
Microsoft made the comments in its response to the ongoing CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) investigation, trying to make the point that the next generation was so far away it was impossible to say whether the Activision Blizzard would affect it.
‘This is an event that only occurs approximately every eight years,’ said Microsoft in reference to the next generation of consoles.
‘If Sony were indeed worried about a hypothetical withholding of Activision content, it would have at the very least six years to prepare a competitive response in time for the launch of the next generation of console.’
Whether this argument will sway the CMA or not remains to be seen, but we now know that both Sony and Microsoft expect the current generation to last at least another five years.
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