My rumour and prediction is that PS6 is launching in 2026. Why? Because AMD have announced 3D caching in their next batch of GPU's launching in 2026. Sony gets a slice of the new tech before the cards launched (see: PS4, PS4PRO, PS5, PS5PRO).
3D stacked cache is too expensive and hot for the console manufacturers to want. Consoles are compact boxes designed to sit under a TV with suboptimal airflow while consuming less than 300 watts of power so there's very little odds of a normie accidentally overloading a circuit by adding one.
Not to mention that cooling the weird-ass APUs in the current gen consoles is already a challenge. The PS5's cooling system is already on the edge of how complex you can probably get away with for a normie device.
I'd love to hear one day just how this backdoor was discovered and why Nintendo doesn't even bother securing it.
Similar to the Xbox 360 being able to download full dev builds completely unauthenticated - finished game binaries on servers weren't considered valuable because the only hardware they could run on was locked down. Adding the overhead of authentication to giant downloads probably wasn't considered worthwhile. By the time Nintendo modernized their digital storefront, the eShop was already dead and it wasn't worth pissing off the Nintendo diehards just to stop pirates when most of the games were well past their prime.
That being said, there was a period where Nintendo was marking 3DS consoles that were running custom firmware and downloading games illegally and then later banning them because the 3DS was still an actively marketed console. The WiiU was dead before the Switch even came out tbh so I don't think they cared.
I should also stress that 3DS piracy was never a massive concern like it was on the DS. DS piracy was - "buy this $20 flashcart, insert a microsd full of .nds files, and now you can play games for free." 3DS is, "okay first find your serial number and FW version then consult this flow-chart (the normie has already given up here)..." It's nominally 'cheaper' but far more inaccessible to tech illiterate normoids.
Sony might be letting Playstation run into financial trouble so that they can shut the American operations down and bring the HQ back to Japan.
This is the biggest hopium imaginable.
Sony Japan only cares about
money. It's willing to eat short-term losses because it's been in the game for a long time and the c-suite knows losses are an inevitable part of any long-running company's history. There's not some conspiracy to make the Americans lose face so the Japanese can take it back. The Japanese can take it back whenever they want to - they haven't because
the guys in Tokyo fucked it up first and did so so badly that Sony downsized them into irrelevance. They did so during the seventh gen when SCE and its Japanese partners failed to deliver
any successful games during the HD transition while SCEA were making money hand-over-fist. We're tired of burgerslop now but the decision to move the HQ to California wasn't an irrational one or some elaborate burger trick on the japs.
I'm tired of hearing about the poor put-upon Playstation Japs who had their rightful throne stolen by cunning burgers and how things would have surely been better if only Sony had stuck with the subsidiary that made the PS3 a laughingstock. It's a fantasy.