Sony said that its next-gen PlayStation 5 gaming console will hit stores ahead of the holidays next year, but the company hasn’t announced a firm launch date for the PS5. As with the previous version, a mid-November release would make plenty of sense, since that means the console will be available during the busiest shopping weeks of the year. Sony will be counting on the Christmas shopping season to ship a large number of new consoles to gamers looking to get the best PlayStation experience Sony has to offer. Similarly, Microsoft is expected to launch the next-gen Xbox during the same timeframe, though we don’t have a launch date for the Xbox Scarlett either.
We still have a long wait ahead of us before Sony makes things official, but it turns out that the new PS5’s price and exact release date may have just been revealed in a huge leak.
A report a few days ago claimed that Sony would actually miss the mid-November PS5 launch timeframe in favor of an early December rollout. The reasoning behind the move is that Sony is looking to get its hands on as many 7nm custom AMD chips as it can for the PlayStation 5 console, with AMD delivering both the CPU and GPU for the PS5 and next-gen Xbox.
A second source now offers the same early December 2020 launch estimate, providing an actual release date for the PS5. That should be December 4th, Slovakian retailer ProGamingShop claims (via ComicBook), although the listing has now been deleted. More interestingly, the shop says the console will cost €499 in the region, which converts to $550. However, a simple conversion isn’t enough to determine the PS5’s US price. That’s not how it works. If this leak is accurate, then the PlayStation 5 should cost $499 in the US.
ComicBook does note one exciting thing about this new rumor, and that’s the release date. The first-gen PlayStation also launched on December 4th, back in 1994. It might make sense for Sony to pick the same date, but it also might make sense for a retailer to list it as a placeholder launch date.
As for the price, it echoes the claims of a PlayStation developer who said almost a year ago that the PS5 would start at $499.
Before getting too excited at the prospect of paying just $100 more on a gaming rig that should feature several major hardware upgrades over its predecessor, remember it’s still too early to confirm anything, especially the reports coming from relatively obscure retailers. It’s one thing for a big name store like Amazon to accidentally leak the release date of a brand new device, and quite another to trust a much smaller company that serves a more limited market.
Sony is expected to unveil the PS5 next February, and the company isn’t likely to share any availability details for the PS5 until then. However, as we get closer to Sony’s rumored PlayStation event, we should start to see more PS5 leaks from more reliable sources.
