As the holiday season rapidly approaches, large corporations are preparing to announce their new products hoping to appeal to consumerists. However, there are two companies particularly that stand out, Sony and Microsoft, the creators of their respective consoles the Playstation 4 and Xbox One. The devices revolutionized console gaming in 2013 but since then have ultimately proven to be large hunky machines. It is undeniable that many outstanding games have been published under these consoles such as Spider-Man PS4, Forza Horizon, and God of War. A final batch of games are being prepared for the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, these games will mark the end of current generation consoles(minus the Nintendo Switch) and the transition to next generation consoles. 

A few weeks ago a Dutch blog known as TechTastic found a Sony patent application that was published for the Playstation 5 and it’s newly designed controller. Though it’s still in development and likely won’t be seen for another year, a few specs and new features have been revealed through a patent submitted by Sony. 

Sony’s successor to their fourth console will most likely be named the PS5; or Playstation 5 and will be much more powerful than the Playstation Pro which gave a small step forward with regards to technological advancements. The new console will be able to support 3D audio, 8K resolution, and ray tracing, which will increase immersion as it replicates real life sunlight. They are getting rid of a hard-disk drive to put in a solid-state drive that will speed up loading times, hopefully allowing PS5 games to have no loading screens. At an investors meeting it was shared that content the PS4 could load in eight seconds, the PS5 will load in less than a second.

The Playstation 5 will have a Blu-ray disc as well as a 4k blu-ray disc player, digital downloads, and game streaming. It will have a data capacity of 100GB of storage and use an SSD to focus installing parts of games that you want to play first, such as multiplayer over campaign. 

Mark Cerny, the architect of the PS4 announced that the Playstation 5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 and PS VR games, meaning that the PS5 will be able to play games off of the PS4 and virtual reality games but did not include PS3, PS2, or PS1 games. It also seems that Sony has plans to improve Playstation VR by laying waste to an abundance of wires and by making it lighter, possibly a wireless version. A report posted by CNET says that they are using eye-tracking software in the headset in order to complicate the sense of control in VR games. 

News about Sony’s new console came shortly after Xbox announced that their new console, project Scarlett will be releasing during the 2020 holiday season. The Playstation 5 does not have a release date but has been confirmed to come in the holiday season of 2020 in order to compete on the market with the new generation Xbox.