Spend $1000 to buy a PS6 console? The era of cloud gaming is coming.

Ever since installing The Legend of Sword and Fairy from floppy disks, I’ve been part of that generation of players who grew up in the gap between consoles and PCs. Back then, reading those Hong Kong strategy guides talking about this thing called PlayStation and playing 3D games on a TV felt as distant as a martial arts legend. Now there’s a PS5 sitting in my living room, and hearing that the PS6 might go for up to 1,000 dollars, that feeling of “things change, people change” hits a bit harder than any bad ending in a game.

Back to this piece of news: domestic media picked up the views of Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pacter. In short: the PS5 Standard Edition launched at 399.99 dollars, and six years on it’s already up to 649.99 dollars. At this rate, he believes the next‑gen PlayStation 6 might reach the 1,000‑dollar tier at launch. He himself admits there won’t be many players willing to drop a grand on a PS6; at that price point it stops being a “hobby purchase” and becomes a “luxury toy,” with a threshold high enough to chill you.

But looking at it calmly, the price is only the surface. What’s harsher is the solution he offers: simply abandon traditional consoles and have the whole industry fully pivot to cloud gaming. In his vision, players in the future won’t need to buy hardware costing thousands; one TV will be enough to run AAA titles directly, with all the computing power offloaded to cloud data centers. This vision sounds a bit like that line in Sword and Fairy 5 about “an age of peace, with no demons in the human world.” It sounds nice when you say it, but to actually get there, who knows how many pitfalls lie along the way. Most likely, only players’ wallets and the smiles of network operators will truly understand.

Putting nostalgia aside, we still have to do the math. Compared to a 1,000‑dollar PS6, once converted, it would be well over 10,000 RMB domestically. At that price you can already build a pretty decent domestically assembled gaming‑oriented PC, and playing domestic wuxia/xianxia titles like GuJian, Black Myth, 潜龙 wouldn’t be a problem at all. By the time you add up a console plus game subscriptions and full‑price new releases, versus a PC plus domestic single‑player titles, purely in terms of cost‑effectiveness it’s hard to say it still has that PS2‑era feeling of “buy one console, roam half the martial world.”

Now look at the cloud gaming path. For players in Europe and the US, it might be a kind of “hardware liberation,” but for us it’s not necessarily a good thing. Cloud‑side computing power, bandwidth quality, latency stability—none of these can be solved just by saying “play directly on your TV.” Not to mention, once platforms go fully cloud‑based, the power of life and death over all games rests in the hands of big companies’ servers: one title gets delisted today, another is “brought into compliance” tomorrow, and players don’t even have a single physical disc left in their hands—only an account that could be unplugged at any time. For someone like me who has watched the rise and fall of domestic games along the way, I had hoped that in the future my living room could host domestic wuxia, Japanese blockbusters, and Western RPGs all together, a true hundred flowers in bloom. If it ultimately evolves into a world where “one cloud platform rules the land,” that kind of single ecosystem is more disheartening than any generational gap in hardware power.

Back to purchase advice: if things really turn out as the analyst predicts and the PS6 launches at around 1,000 dollars, I’d lean toward three options. First, stick with the current platform: let the PS5 fight on for a few more years and wait until there are truly era‑defining titles. Second, put the budget into a PC that can handle both work and entertainment, feast on all the domestic wuxia and xianxia titles, then pick up a discounted console later. Third, watch how cloud gaming actually rolls out in China, and wait until the networks, pricing, and licensing environment are at least somewhat decent before deciding whether to “hand over all games to the cloud.” Whichever choice it is, what I hope most is that when we talk about a new console, what we’re discussing are new titles that “have that old Sword and Fairy flavor,” not hardware stories that make our hearts sink just from looking at the price tag.