Sony Group Corp. is now considering pushing back the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. That would be a major upset to a carefully orchestrated strategy to sustain user engagement between hardware generations. Close rival Nintendo Co., which contributed to the surplus demand in 2025 after its new Switch 2 console drove storage card purchases, is also contemplating raising the price of that device in 2026, people familiar with its plans said. Sony and Nintendo representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Valve has confirmed that the Steam Deck OLED may be “intermittently” unavailable in some regions due to the ongoing RAM shortage.
The company added a note to its store page for the Steam Deck after reports that the hardware was out of stock in the US and Japan.
Gizmodo:
During a recent Q2 earnings call, WD’s CEO Irving Tan told shareholders, “we’re pretty much sold out [of hard drives] for calendar 2026. We have firm POs [purchase orders] with our top seven customers.” You read that correctly. Western Digital, the company you know as the producer of hard drives (if you know them at all) will not be able to sell you a new hard drive until at least 2027. And that’s a load-bearing “at least.” According to Tan on that same call, two of their agreements with these big buyers go to 2027 and another all the way into 2028.
They say it comes in threes, right?
Sony, Valve, Nintendo, and basically anyone with a use for a hard drive is absolutely screwed. And why?
Orders that haven’t yet been fulfilled, for data centers that haven’t been built yet, for AI services which don’t generate money, to perform services most people don’t even want.
I feel like this is going to lead to a really strong resurgence in the Right to Repair movement, as we’re all going to be holding onto our tech longer.
I recognize, the bit has been “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.” but I didn’t think we’d be forced into this scenario. And we’ll see on the “paid more to work less” part.