The veteran gaming industry analyst has once again made a prediction that sounds hard to swallow, but the future has a habit of making fools out of certainty. According to Michael Pachter, console pricing may become so extreme in the next generation that game streaming could shift from being a side option to becoming the industry’s escape route.
The PlayStation 6 has not been officially announced yet, but with current price hikes hitting RAM and SSDs, it is already difficult to estimate how much the system could cost in 2027 or 2028. Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush, says we should not expect a low price, because the era of $500 consoles is likely over. In his view, however, the future of gaming could still be rescued by streaming. Since Sony will have to secure RAM for its next-gen platform in a market where the highest bidder tends to win, the PlayStation 6 could easily push toward the $1,000 mark.
The high cost of hardware – including repeated price increases for current-generation systems, as well as Microsoft selling relatively few Xbox consoles after leaning harder into Xbox Game Pass – has accelerated a process that Pachter believes started several generations ago, with each console cycle gradually becoming smaller than the last. A PlayStation 6 launching at $1,000 could become the breaking point that finally ends the traditional console cycle, but Pachter argues that gaming could still have an affordable future through streaming.
With Microsoft targeting a somewhat different audience through Project Helix, and with the possibility of the PlayStation 6 becoming an unreasonable luxury item – something some players might not even view as a meaningful upgrade – the console market could change dramatically if Sony launches its next machine at a price far above the currently estimated component cost of roughly $750. Even so, it remains unclear whether the future of gaming will actually move toward the streaming model Pachter keeps predicting.
“The console manufacturers can afford to bid up the price of RAM… but the console price will stay the same or go up and everybody’s happy. I think that console prices are going to keep going up as long as demand for the components goes up for other reasons. So AI… I think that the solution to that is get rid of consoles and go to streaming games on TVs. Somebody’s going to figure out a way to play console games without a console, then we don’t care. I’ve been predicting the end of the console life cycle for over 10 years. Each one is going to be smaller than the one before. One of the drivers of that is higher prices.” – Pachter said.
It is worth remembering that Pachter has built up a somewhat shaky reputation among players thanks to a long list of bold predictions that did not exactly age well. Four years ago, he claimed that Grand Theft Auto VI would take players all over the world, while it is now perfectly clear that the game is set in Leonida, a fictionalized version of Florida. In 2022, he also predicted that Game Pass would hit 100 million active subscribers after Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King, but that milestone has long since failed to materialize, and the service’s momentum still appears to have flattened out. In late February 2026, he also argued that Microsoft had already undermined the next Xbox by betting too heavily on the Game Pass model.
We will see how things actually develop. Either way, stormy times almost certainly lie ahead for players.
Source: WCCFTech
