Tomorrow's games today

As the PS5 and Xbox Series get older, what will the next generation of games consoles be like?

- Ian Evenden

Now that the Switch 2 has been out for a while, things seem quiet in the gaming world. Too quiet. There’s usually something just about visible on the horizon, some rumour about a great new console that will blow the others out of the water, an unreleased king to command a place by our TVs.

But not right now. While we’ve seen a leak of PlayStation 6 specs that may or may not be real, we know basically nothing about any new PSP or Xbox consoles at the time of writing. The current console generation has been running since the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series were launched at the end of 2020, and has seen a refresh of one of its biggest players, the PS5. Nintendo seems to have retired from the front line of the console wars since it released the Wii in 2006, instead concentrating on creating a line of lower-powered consoles that blur the line between a box under your TV and a handheld machine.

Switch 2 is not to be underestimated, but if it’s the latest 4K graphics with cutting-edge rendering techniques running at improbable framerates you're looking for, Nintendo is perhaps not going to provide it.

That task falls to Sony and Microsoft, and a recent PS6 specs leak via the YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead also gives us insight into the next Xbox, as the two console titans tend to be similar in terms of power and the games they can run.

The leak reveals a supercharged PS5 Pro, offering up to three times the graphics performance, and with a possible handheld companion that sounds rather like a faster Switch. If it’s real, it’s not exactly a revolution, but is also exactly what we expected. The release date, so we're told, will be in time for Christmas 2027.

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