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Report: Don’t expect Sony to announce the PS5 any time soon

Published Apr 10th, 2018 6:56PM EDT
Sony PS5 release date
Image: Jacob Siegal/BGR

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Rumors about next-generation consoles typically begin springing up days after a new console launches. The rumors are rarely, if ever, worth paying attention to, but when several rumors all crop up at around the same time, it’s hard not to be curious.  So following the latest round of rumors, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier reached out to “dozens” of developers to see if Sony might really be thinking about debuting the PlayStation 5 before the end of the year.

As Schreier points out, we’re going on five years since the launches of the PS4 and Xbox One in 2013. Fans of each brand had to wait seven and eight years, respectively, for the latest versions, so one might expect the next generation to be right around the corner. Based on Schreier’s conversations though, that’s unlikely to be the case.

According to Schreier, of the dozens of people he contacted, “two people said they were directly familiar with plans for Sony’s new console. Those two people both told me that the next PlayStation is unlikely to release in 2019, let alone 2018, although they were careful to be clear that these plans are always shifting.”

While conversations about Sony’s next-gen console have taken place, there is no indication that a new console will be out within the next two years, much less by this fall, as a SemiAccurate report claims. For the PS5 to launch this year, it would need to be in manufacturing already. At the moment, it’s unclear if developers even have devkits.

Conversations with developers aside, it’s hard to imagine Sony or Microsoft moving on to new consoles so soon after debuting new hardware in the form of the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. Sony launched the PS4 Pro less than a year and a half ago, and it’s much more significant than just a makeover like the PS3 received late in its life cycle. Abandoning the PS4 Pro this early wouldn’t make any sense, especially as studios are still learning to harness its power.

Based on what Schreier has heard, 2020 is the earliest that we should reasonably expect to see a new console from Sony. That’s not to say that plans can’t change (as we saw when Sony moved up the release date of the PS4 to beat Microsoft to market by a week), but don’t get your hopes up for an announcement soon.

Jacob Siegal
Jacob Siegal Associate Editor

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.