In a truly shocking turn of events, Sony have admitted that they’re secretively working on new PlayStation hardware, preparing for a new generation of consoles.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida said that it would be “necessary to have a next-generation hardware.” Though he stopped short of calling is PlayStation 5, Play5tation, or something a bit wackier like PlayStation Superbus. He also didn’t talk about the console’s shape, whether it will continue the parallelogram design of the PS4, perhaps adding an extra layer over the PS4 Pro to assert its dominance, if it will be pentagonal to celebrate being the fifth console with five sides. Alternatively, they could license the Thunderbird 5 space station model and feature a controller that looks like Johnny-5.
While Sony are still very tight lipped, Microsoft are already making clear moves to try and be more competitive next generation. At E3 they announced that their hardware team is already working on the next generation, while yesterday saw the announcement of Project xCloud as part of their emerging game streaming strategy.
Source: Financial Times (paywall) via Eurogamer
Tuffcub
Clearly 5 Star should play at the launch, which will be broadcast live on Channel 5 and hosted by the Famous Five.
Tony Cawley
5 star need to sing “I’ve got five on it” then we’re good to go.
Tuffcub
With 5IVE as backing singers.
ron_mcphatty
Great news, I’m still not sold on streaming so it’s nice that there’s another traditional PlayStation in the works. Well, I assume it’s not a streaming machine if they’re working on it years ahead. I wonder if we’ll get PS4 backwards compatibility and brute force emulation of PS2 discs this time?
MrYd
Backwards compatibility seems almost 100% certain, doesn’t it? Everyone seems to think the PS5 will just be a more powerful PS4, so BC should be fairly trivial (although I’m sure some games would end up having weird issues).
Even if it’s something most people might not use much. Even after MS did it, they then went and provided numbers to prove it’s not that popular. But then we had the weird mid-gen upgrades this time, so the PS5 (and the next XBox) might not be quite the big new hardware we’re used to. Big improvement over the original PS4/XBone, not so much over the Pro/OneX. Definite incentive to add BC to keep people on your hardware there. Especially for Sony with a big lead this time with a lot of people buying them even 5 years later.
Unless Sony do one of their weird things again, it’ll run PS4 games. They wouldn’t want to give MS the win on that one.
Emulating PS2 games might be possible. How much work is done to get those PS2 games that currently run on the PS4?
Of course, there’s a chance Sony will go mad and do something silly. If we want to go throwing the number 5 around randomly, maybe it’ll cost £500.
ron_mcphatty
Yeah good points about it not being popular but I want it so I’ll keep harping on :) Architecturally think it’s it’s easy to do this time and if quality control doesn’t break the bank then why not, like you say it gives the Pro owners an extra reason for the smaller upgrade.
Talking of quality control, my old housemate at uni did PS1 BC testing and bug hunting at Sony Liverpool on the PS3 test units as a summer job. He got assigned totally crap games, the worst of which were My Little Pony and Spiceworld – The Game. It sounded like hard, laborious work, playing each game through multiple times, doing comparisons with big lists from the original release and writing exhaustive notes on the exact causes of bugs, which he had to work out. He hated Sony after that and bought an XBox360, hah!
Stefan L
Within the next two years, the only really viable option is sticking with AMD and the maturity of their set up. Backward compatibility will be effectively free for Sony to implement because of that. The only possible thing stopping that is if Sony go with 4 or 6 physical cores for the CPU with hyperthreading, but Zen is such a big jump in raw power, it shouldn’t be an issue.
PS2 Classics as sold through the PS store are put through an emulation wrapper, with a certain amount of work then done to test it, tweak it and add trophies. All of that work should carry forward as well, but the difference to Microsoft is that Sony don’t simply let you use your old discs.
MrYd
I’m not sure BC is quite as simple as “it’ll be AMD stuff again, so it’ll work”.
The PS4Pro basically does that anyway with the option to use all that extra power for games that haven’t got native Pro support. But doesn’t that cause issues with some games? Sony warn it may have unexpected side effects, I’ve definitely heard of some games having issues, and people have generally advised to not have boost mode turned on with PSVR games.
Add even more power with the PS5, and there’s a possibility things could get even messier with some games. I suspect mostly due to timing issues and “bad” coding. Console games tend to try and squeeze the most out of the hardware and I can imagine someone thinking “let’s not waste a tiny amount of time checking if something has happened, because we know it won’t have happened yet because of the standard console hardware”, and then you go and throw more power at it and find that thing that shouldn’t have happened yet actually has happened, and the 1 thing you assumed you could do before the other thing now happens afterwards because the timing is all screwed up.
I guess a PS5 running PS4 games needs to give the same boost mode option and be extra careful it doesn’t accidentally take advantage of the extra power if it’ll cause problems.
Stefan L
Boost mode warnings stem from some games being programmed too rigidly to the original hardware for it to work. There’s no issues if you don’t use boost mode, and there’s no reason why BC would try to apply more power than necessary by default. It could be an option, but it wouldn’t be the default.
And sure, Sony will have to ensure the core system software and firmware retains compatibility, but Ryzen retains all the instruction sets of Jaguar and it’s still fundamentally x86 AMD64. It’s dramatically simpler than the big to little endian shift X360 on Xbox One backward compatibility demands and simpler again when compared to emulating a chipset.
The bigger sticking point is the GPU, where architectures can change much more dramatically, but Vega and Navi are seen as being part of the same GCN family as the GPUs in PS4 and PS4 Pro.
Sony will have to make it work, but it will be comparatively the simplest BC Sony have done and the simplest since the GameCube>Wii>Wii U.
camdaz
There’s a good chance that there will be two versions of PS5, one with disc drive and one without. They may hold back the disc-less one for a while.
Bornindafire
Well it seems like we will see ps5 before we see a triple A boxing game for ps4 .
That’s sad to say the least
Bornindafire
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Matthijs
I’d rather not but thank you for trolling!
SYY2127
I wonder how long the traditional console will last before it gives way to game streaming devices similar to an Apple TV. Both Microsoft and PlayStation have been developing their streaming platforms and some publishers are working on their own. At the moment I feel like we might only have one or two traditional console generations left.
Foxhound_Solid
Traditional console with the disc-less option look to be the route for the almighty PS5. Until 5G rolls out we are not in a position to all game using streaming. We will, but not yet.
The announcement shouldn’t be a shock, its good practice, giving yourself years of development time – being ready is essential with tech moving so fast.
I cant wait for the next gen even though I am in love with my PS4Pro!