New consoles used to come out every five years - so where's the PlayStation 6? You used to be able to count the number of years between game consoles on one hand. The original Sony PlayStation came out in the UK in September 1995. Five years later, the PS2 was released and brought with it significant changes. It was a similar story for other consoles but, of late, things seem to have slowed down - which might explain why, as the PS5 hits its fifth anniversary, a potential PS6 is nowhere in sight.

The PS5 Pro improves on the four-year-old standard model with boosted internals. The upgrades start with a GPU with 67 percent more compute units and 28 percent faster RAM. These allow it to (at most) triple the PS5's ray-tracing performance, leading to fancier lighting, reflections and shadows. In the PS5 Pro, Sony introduces its AI-powered answer to Nvidia's DLSS, called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR). Built for 4K TVs and displays, the tech upgrades lower-resolution frames to ultra-HD graphics "with astonishing detail."

This summer's Federal Trade Commission Microsoft trial revealed all kinds of intriguing details about how the tech company's gaming arm saw its rivals and the future of gaming. But now, a court document leak has spilled the beans on new consoles, a new controller and even a list of new game projects (new Dishonored? The most leftfield part, though, might be a letter from Xbox chief Phil Spencer talking about Nintendo. He said Nintendo was a prime asset for Microsoft's continued push in gaming and could be the company's best bet for consumer relevance. Spencer added Nintendo had a board of directors that had not pushed for increases in market growth in ages -- indicating, of course, a massive difference in how Nintendo governs itself compared to Microsoft.

Nintendo has a bad reputation for its online infrastructure, often being ridiculed for lagging behind in adopting the latest technologies or features (such as requiring a smartphone for voice chat). This includes transitioning user data between your old console and a new one. Fortunately, it sounds like Nintendo is at least looking into making that easier before the launch of its next console. In a shareholder meeting late last week, when asked if your Nintendo Switch purchases would carry over to future game consoles, President and CEO Shuntaro Furukawa says (via Google Translate), "In the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next-generation console, we would like to make every effort to ensure that customers can make the transition smoothly while using their Nintendo account." This seems to imply that Nintendo is at least looking into possibly allowing current Nintendo Switch titles purchased through the eShop to be carried over to whatever comes next. Of course, Nintendo doesn't make comments about future hardware that hasn't been announced yet, so take this with a grain of salt.

The UK video games market hit a new record of £7.16bn last year as the pandemic continued to fuel an unprecedented boom in home entertainment, with gamers rushing to stock up on new consoles and virtual reality kit even as overall sales of games fell. Lockdown conditions have made gaming one of the biggest pandemic winners with the value of the UK market now a third higher than in 2019 before the coronavirus crisis hit and worth more than the music and video streaming markets combined. The amount spent by gaming fans – on everything from new consoles, software and mobile games to themed events, toys and magazines – rose 1.9% year on year beating expectations that the market would slide following the gaming gold rush at the height of the pandemic in 2020. The overall market rose despite a 6.3% fall in the sale of video game software to £4.28bn, with the most popular titles including Electronic Arts' Fifa 22, Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty: Vanguard and Take-Two Interactive's Grand Theft Auto V. "The important story here is how much of the lockdown related boost seen in 2020 has been successfully retained during 2021's'year of correction'," said Steven Bailey, a senior analyst at Omdia. The attractiveness of the gaming market – which is worth almost £1.8bn annually more than 2019 – has sparked a wave of consolidation with US and Chinese gaming companies splashing out more than £2bn on British video games makers over the last two years.

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Welcome back to Talking Tech. Well, Christmas is almost here and obviously you've heard us talk about this before, but one of the hottest tech gifts out there is a video game console, specifically the PlayStation 5 from Sony, and the Microsoft Xbox Series X. Anytime you go to any retailer, whether it's Target, Best Buy, whatever, if you're one of those folks that has been looking for one of these consoles for weeks and months now, you have probably seen the same familiar message over and over again, sold out.

Sony has released its first beta update for the PS5, allowing access to new features. Chief among them is a change that makes the M.2 SSD slot finally available for use. That allows for much faster read and write speeds, allowing the console's internal storage to be updated and used with the latest games. The update also brings some other smaller changes to the user experience, as well as fixing confusion over whether the console was downloading PlayStation 4 or 5 games. Until now, the console might accidentally play older versions of titles, but now different versions will appear separately and indicate which console they are intended for. Sony unveiled the beta programme for the PS5 last month, when it encouraged those interested to apply.

After failing to unveil a new console at the E3 video game conference in June, Nintendo finally announced the long-expected Switch (OLED model) on Tuesday. The new console, available starting on October 8, will be priced at $349.99, $50 more than the base model Switch. Long rumored to be called the Switch Pro, the new console will have a seven-inch OLED screen, 64GB of internal storage, a wired LAN port and it comes with a kickstand for tabletop mode, similar to a tablet. It will come in two color schemes at launch: a white set that has white Joy-Con controllers, a black console and a white dock; and a neon red/neon blue set, that has neon red and blue controllers, a black console and a black dock. Nintendo finally announced the long-expected Switch (OLED model) on Tuesday.

In the Guide's weekly Solved! Last year, something terrible happened. Or that, even – something else, that you might not even be able to blame on the Tories. With new consoles from Sony and Microsoft expected, a raft of video game publishers announced that the RRP of their new releases would increase for the first time since the mid-00s. Games such as PS5's Demon's Souls would land at £69.99, not the £50-£55 of previous console generations.

This Christmas has been the biggest ever for the video games industry, as lockdown, technological leaps and new consoles combine to bring more interest than ever to the sector. Steam, the PC gaming platform, recorded its largest ever Christmas Day, according to public stats, with almost 25 million people logged on to the service at 3.10pm UK time, more than 6 million of whom were actively playing a game concurrently. That was up from the 15 million who logged on to the service at once on Christmas Day 2019. By contrast, Sony and Microsoft are notoriously tight-lipped about player counts for PlayStation and Xbox, but both entered the festive season with much to celebrate. The two companies continue to sell their new consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X & S, as fast as they can make them, a fact that has caused no small amount of stress for households trying to secure one of the coveted machines to leave under the tree.