PlayStation 5 is coming at the end of 2020. What to expect
PlayStation 4 has sold over 100 million units and its cycle is coming to an end. Sony can focus on its successor, PlayStation 5 which will be released at the end of the next year.
It’s been almost six years since the launch date of PlayStation 4, a hugely successful home console from Sony. Over 100 million units have been sold and hundreds of games have been released, including exclusive hits like Uncharted 4, God of War, Spider-Man or Horizon: Zero Dawn. But now it’s time to move on. New generation of consoles are being teased and we can expect them as soon as next year. We can count with PlayStation 5 and probably with new Xbox too.
What to expect from PlayStation 5
We are finally starting to get a pieces of information about a new console. The price or the appearance are still a mystery, but let’s start with the known things. Sony confirmed that the official name of the new console will be PlayStation 5. It’s not a surprise, we expected that, but now it is official. We also know when the console will appear in stores. It will be available at holiday season 2020. The exact date is unknown but we can guess that it’ll be around half of November. Sony will probably want to catch those Christmas buyers. And PS4 also launched at 15th November in USA and at the end of the month in other regions.
Sony last week also shared a new info about controllers. New Dualshocks will have at least two innovations. First one is about better vibrations. The company is replacing “rumble” technology with haptic feedback which should makes you feel a broader range of feedback. “Crashing into a wall in a race car feels much different than making a tackle on the football field. You can even get a sense for a variety of textures when running through fields of grass or plodding through mud,” says Sony on its blog. It is probably a similar technology as HD rumble in Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons.
The second controller improvement is applied to L2/R2 buttons. It’s called “adaptive triggers” and it should cause some resistance when pulling a trigger in some suitable situations. You will feel tactile feedback when drawing a bow or accelerating a vehicle in rocky terrain for example. It will be up to developers how they will integrate these new features to their games.
PlayStation 5 specs
As for the hardware specifications, PlayStation 5 will use chipset from AMD as was the case with PlayStation 4. The CPU will be based on AMD’s third generation Ryzen line with eight cores of 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. Custom GPU is expected to be a variation of the Radeon Navi family with support for ray tracing. The console will support resolutions up to 8K.
Mark Cerny from Sony also noted that PS5 will feature SSD for faster loading times. For a comparison, a segment of Spider-Man game will load under a second on PS5, while the same part on PS4 take 15 seconds to load. PS5 is also expected to come with Blu-ray optical drive.
Good news is that PlayStation 5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 games. And you can also count with current PSVR support.
Will it succeed?
Sony has now much better position than Microsoft with its Xbox. PS4 crossed a 100 million units milestone while Xbox One is not even at half of that. Nintendo Wii U was an epic fail and therefore quickly replaced by Nintendo Switch which is quite a success. Sony is clearly a winner of this console generation. But it does not mean, that it will be the same with the next one.
Just look the generation behind. It was much tighter fight. PS3 and Xbox 360 reached very similar sales, both with over 80 million units sold. But the winner was Nintendo with its Wii console and over 100 million units sold.
If PlayStation 5 wants to succeed it needs to offer intriguing features, plenty of exclusive titles, next-gen visuals and competitive price. Microsoft won’t be the only competitor. Google is launching game streaming service Stadia, PC is stronger than ever with a push from Epic Games and we can maybe expect some other players in the game streaming area.
