This is the first official statement made about the currently-unnamed ‘PS5’
It has been five years since the world was gifted with the PS4 and ever since, there has been an eye on what Sony would release next, console-wise.
As Microsoft continues to barge ahead with their next-gen stuff, Sony has remained mostly very quiet about the whole thing, but this week, Kenichiro Yoshida, boss of Sony, finally made the company’s first official statement on the matter when talking to the Financial Times: “At this point, what I can say is it’s necessary to have a next-generation hardware.”
We know that isn’t a lot to go on, but it is the most they’ve ever said about it, so we’ll take it.
According to slightly more unofficial sources (via Eurogamer), apparently we shouldn’t be expecting a huge leap from what players already have access to: “[Early] indications were that it might not represent a major departure from the PS4, and that the fundamental architecture would be similar.”
However, one big change that we should anticipate is something that players have been crying out for on the current-gen consoles for years now.
As reported by T3, the next video game console could add backward compatibility for older titles, according to a new patent secured by the Japanese technology company.
The patent, entitled “Remastering by Emulation”, was approved and published on 2 October 2018 by Sony Interactive Entertainment America.
The patented technology is designed to remaster textures in older video games and replace them with shiny new ones better suited for modern TVs in real-time. If the system works as Sony describes in its patent, it should be able to remaster ageing video games on the fly to bring their look closer to a contemporary game.
Currently, the extent of backward compatibility on the PS4 is only available on the streaming service games available on PlayStation Now service, but that may expand even further upon the release of the new console.
Expect a full announcement closer to the time of E3 2019.
