The PlayStation 5 is expected to arrive in November 2020 at a price of around 500 euros. Here are the likely features and the latest news
The successor to Sony's most popular console ever, namely the PS4, will arrive in November 2020 and will be priced at $499. These are the latest news about the PlayStation 5 reported by Hideki Yasuda, an analyst in the Research Division of Ace Securities. Yasuda is a source considered authoritative in Japan, where he deals with analysis of the electronics market with a particular focus on the gaming world.
The analyst, moreover, predicts that PS5 will sell very well right away: 6 million units by the end of the first quarter of 2021, which will reach 21 million units sold by March 31, 2022. According to Yasuda, therefore, Sony PS5 will not suffer much from competition coming from Google Stadia or other online gaming platforms. We'd like to remind you that Google has decided to present Stadia with the slogan "The future of video games is not a console" and, if Mountain View is right, Sony could struggle to replicate the sales figures of its previous consoles.
PS5: SSD and other technical specifications
A few weeks ago, however, we learned directly from Mark Cerny (Lead System Architect of PS4 who is also working on the development of PS5) that the next Sony console will have top-level technical features. Among them stands out the SSD disk, which will drastically reduce the loading times of video games and scene changes. For the rest, the PS5 will be a console largely based on AMD technology: the CPU will be an AMD Zen 2 at 7 nm (and perhaps will have 16 cores), while the GPU will be an AMD Navi. Both of these chips will hit the market in the third quarter of 2019, and soon after, they will become part of the PS5's hardware. Sony's new console, thanks to these and other components, should support 8K resolution (certainly for video, it is not yet known even for real-time graphics in games) and also three-dimensional audio. The only big doubt yet unresolved about the PS5 hardware is the one related to the amount of RAM. The PS5, then, will not be a simple upgrade of the PS4 Pro but a completely new machine on which to run next-generation games even if, it is good to remember, backward compatibility with the PS4 will be guaranteed.
PS5: will Sony really sell that many?
Turning to Yasuda's predictions, however, we wonder if those relating to sales are then so credible. It must be said, in fact, that although the PS4 is an excellent console, sales (updated to end of January 2019) are stationary at 94 million pieces. Which are not few and are certainly more than the 86 million PS3 sold. But they are much less than the 157 million units totaled by the PS2, which remains, at the moment, the best-selling Sony console ever. And most likely it will remain so, since November 2020 is around the corner and many people in the coming months will not buy a PS4 and put aside money for the PS5. That is, if Google isn't right when it says that the future of gaming doesn't pass through a console.