Sony confirmed to be developing the next PlayStation

With the 5-year anniversary of the PlayStation 4’s release approaching, Sony has confirmed that it is developing the next system for this console.

“At this point, I would say we need next-generation hardware,” Kenichiro Yoshida, president and CEO of Sony, said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Yoshida didn’t say the name of the system, so we can’t say it will be officially called “PlayStation 5.” We also don’t have a release date yet, but John Kodera, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment – the official name of the company’s gaming division – hinted in May that the next generation of PlayStation is a few steps away. at least 3 more years.

“We will use the next three years to prepare for the next step, taking one step back to take three steps forward,” said Kodera. Sony plans to adopt this tactic during the 2020 financial year, which ends in spring 2021, so the PS5 probably won’t launch at least after that point.

PS4 is considered Sony’s most successful hardware system since the PlayStation 2 – considered the best-selling console of all time with more than 155 million copies sold. Sony has sold more than 81.2 million PS4 consoles worldwide, and has surpassed PlayStation 3 sales.

More importantly, PlayStation has been Sony’s number one business in the financial years since the company launched the PS4 in November 2013 (fiscal year 2014, as of April 1). During Sony’s 2017 fiscal year, which ended March 31, 2018, Sony’s games revenue came in at 1.94 trillion yen ($17.53 billion) – accounting for nearly 23% of the company’s $75 billion revenue. whole company.

According to game publishers familiar with Sony’s PS5 plans, the Financial Times reports that the console “may not be too different from the PS4, and the basic structure will be the same.” It looks like both Sony and Microsoft have extended the life of their current consoles by releasing 4K-powered hardware – PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X – that are fully compatible with current titles.

Everyone from game directors to casual watchers of the gaming industry has long predicted that the age of traditional consoles is on the way down, but for now, Sony is continuing to thrive. Specifically, Kodera’s predecessor, Andrew House, predicted in April that game developers will continue to produce game discs in the near future. House said the gaming industry will likely hit a “peak” as cloud gaming becomes mainstream, but does mention that “this business model has to be thought through.”

In 2012, House was still running the PlayStation business at the time it acquired game streaming platform Gaikai for $380 million. Sony uses Gaikai technology as the basis for its current cloud service, PlayStation Now, launched in 2013. Users can pay a monthly PlayStation Now fee to access a library of more than 500 PS2, PS3 games. and PS4, with the ability to download new PS2 and PS4 games added. The service is only accessible via PS4 or PC.

The PS4 was the console at the forefront of the game streaming service, but Nintendo and Microsoft have now caught up, and other competitors are slowly making their way into the space.

The Nintendo Switch may not be powerful enough to run the Resident Evil 7 biohazrd, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey games, but in Japan, Nintendo is experimenting with streaming these games to their Switch mobile system. Microsoft announced that it plans to stream Xbox One games to devices such as tablets and smartphones in the Project Xcloud project – this is considered a platform for developing streaming consoles, which will be released with the console. Next Xbox. And Google has partnered with Ubisoft to stream Assassin’s Creed Odyssey game to the Chrome browser, through Google’s new streaming project called Project Stream.

“Aside from the technological challenges, there’s no reason why game streaming can’t emerge the same way we’ve seen in the film, music and TV industries,” said House when he was a former PlayStation executive. .

Kodera, now head of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said in May that paid services and online services will play an important role in the next PlayStation platform.

“We need to move away from the traditional console lifecycle,” said Kodera. “We’re no longer at a point where you can only think about consoles or just networking, like it’s two completely different things.”