It looks like the long wait to see the next generation of PlayStation may be over, with industry rumors pointing to the PS5’s grand reveal in February.
PlayStation fans might have been getting a little antsy about the PS5. Both consoles from the two major players in the industry will launch this year. We’ve seen a lot from Microsoft already regarding the new Xbox — which is just called ‘Xbox’, for… reasons.
Microsoft has revealed the design, AMD has revealed an incorrect set of ports, and we know broadly what’s inside it, even if that’s just gamers being unreasonable. We also know that, as a part of the Xbox family, it won’t receive any first-party exclusives for at least a year as it has to share its toys with the Xbox One.
Meanwhile on the PlayStation 5 front, Sony has revealed its logo. In fact, like Microsoft, Sony has been talking about the PS5’s capabilities — 8K visuals, hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, backwards compatibility, and even how cool the new controller will be — but we’re yet to see anything tangible. With Sony skipping out on E3 for the second year in a row, the question remained: when will Sony reveal the actual console?
The answer looks set to be February, and there’s a few pieces of evidence pointing to this particular window. Firstly, there’s the annual Destination PlayStation bash. That’s a trade event which Sony has traditionally used to reveal its plans for the year to retailers and third-party publishers. In recent years, Sony has been of the opinion that June — the month of E3 — is too late in the year to start informing its clients what it’ll be up to around the Holiday period, so it’s used Destination PlayStation every February since 2014 to do so instead.
However this year’s Destination PlayStation looks to be a bust as far as a PS5 reveal is concerned. Gaming journalist Mike Futter has revealed on Twitter that Sony won’t actually be hosting it. Futter believes that Sony has withdrawn from the fair in Scottsdale, Arizona, and a distributor has stepped in to host instead.
This suggests that Sony has something else going on in February that it would like to concentrate on — such as a major console reveal. A trade event also wouldn’t meet with this part of the quoted justification for Sony’s withdrawal from E3:
“Our focus is on making sure fans feel part of the PlayStation family and have access to play their favorite content.”
Right now, Sony is hosting a month-long event in New York, called Experience PlayStation, and marking the 25th anniversary of the PlayStation brand. That event will run every afternoon from January 14 to February 16 at the Sony Square NYC building off Madison Avenue in New York City. It’s open to all, and a PS5 reveal to close out the celebrations would certainly make fans feel part of it.
You may recall that Sony first revealed the PlayStation 4 in New York City, way back in February 2013. That took place at the now-closed Sony Theater in Times Square, which also hosted the recent GT Sport World Tour event in the city. The PS5’s status is already far more advanced than that, with just the physical form and some “big differences” yet to make a public debut.
Of course none of this is official, and we doubt Sony will reveal its true plan until much closer to whatever reveal event it has planned. Stay tuned to GTPlanet for more as we get it.
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