The PlayStation 5 is one of the most hotly anticipated new products of the season. That’s because Sony is expected to finally give the PS5 a proper announcement event as soon as next month. That should include a design reveal, which is long overdue given that Microsoft’s Xbox Series X design was unveiled several weeks ago. The PlayStation Meeting 2020 was initially rumored to take place in February, but Sony has yet to issue any official invites. The company did pull out of MWC 2020 days before the event itself was canceled over coronavirus fears. But while we’ve been waiting for Sony to finally announce plans for the console, we’ve stumbled upon a few leaks that suggest the PS5 design may have been staring us in the face all along.
It all started several months ago when an intrepid blogger found the following illustration in a Sony patent. At the time, we speculated that we may be looking at the PS5 design:
Soon after that, several developers who had access to the PS5 dev kit confirmed that the device in the illustration is real. That’s the PS5 dev kit console, not the final design of the PlayStation 5, they said. That made some sense. After all, development hardware usually looks nothing like the final product. On the other hand, did Sony go through all the trouble of creating this particular design only for a dev kit? And would it bother patenting the design just for a dev kit? We’ve discussed these questions and more in our earlier PS5 coverage — it just doesn’t make sense for a throwaway dev box.
Still, since the most recent PS5 dev kit photos came in, we had no reason to suspect that the gaming console would look like the development platform. But then, this happened. Someone posted the following image on Reddit, a photo that shows the purported Japanese version of the PlayStation site that briefly had a PS5 menu item on display.
As you can see, the console features that inverted “V” seen on the dev kit. Is the image real or is it a forgery meant to attract attention? After all, we’ve seen plenty of PS5 fakes so far, including few instances of fake boot screens for the console.
At this point, there’s no way to tell if the leak is genuine. But that obviously doesn’t change the fact that there’s mounting evidence to suggest this is indeed what Sony’s PS5 will end up looking like when it debuts. Again, it won’t be exactly the same as the dev kit — but Sony put far too much effort into designing, building, and protecting this new V design. It’s also obviously worth noting that “V” is the Roman numeral for 5, of course, which is why all the previous leaks showing the purported PlayStation 5 design make plenty of sense.
