6th gen mini consoles seem unlikely for a variety of reasons. There's the more powerful hardware needed, which will push the price up, along with the more comp

6th gen mini consoles seem unlikely for a variety of reasons. There's the more powerful hardware needed, which will push the price up, along with the more complex controllers, which basically won't be any cheaper to make now than they were at launch. Then there's storage. If people are expecting 30-60 games, and all of those games are a gig each, you're probably going to need a 64GB micro SD card, which is another increase to the BoM bill. The PS Classic probably avoided putting too many multi-disc games and analogue sticks for this reason, but you can't ignore this in the 6th gen. The big killer is going to be licensing costs though. 5th gen and earlier games generate basically no revenue. Even the more popular ones only sell for $5-$10 when they're rereleased, and most don't sell at all. By the 6th gen though, the basic level of graphical fidelity is high enough that "HD Remasters" are now a thing that you can sell for $30 each, or maybe $60 as a trilogy and can be produced for very little upfront investment. This makes convincing rightsholders to license inclusion of a game for probably $1 per unit a hard sell, as for most of them, that's severely undercutting themselves with the same target audience.