Much has been said about the next generation of consoles coming from Sony and Microsoft, aptly rumoured to be the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett respectively. We’ve heard it all, from supposed release periods to support for cloud-based gaming. With Google Stadia making waves and touting hardware capable of 10.7 teraflops of performance, will Sony and Microsoft’s machines aspire to the same?
According to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, they’re actually aiming higher than that. On the ResetERA forums, Schreier noted, “I’ve been saying since roughly March 2018 (in this very thread), next-gen is coming in 2020. That Semiaccurate article saying 2018 (lol) got people’s hopes up for 2019, but by now I hope it’s clear that the PS5 ain’t coming out this fall.”
Schreier also said that the total number of people who were even told about next-gen is “still very limited.” “Even within companies like, say, DICE, there’ll be a small team of engineers who now have a rough idea of specs, and everyone else will know when they need to know,” he said. “Not a lot of devs are disclosed on next-gen right now.
“In other words, don’t expect much in the way of substantial leakage just yet. The only thing to know for sure is that both Sony and Microsoft are aiming higher than that ‘10.7 teraflops’ number that Google threw out last week. (And, as has been reported, Microsoft’s got a few things in the works.)”
Of course, you should take all of this with a grain of salt. Xbox boss Phil Spencer did remark after the reveal of Stadia, “Google went big today and we have a couple of months until E3 when we will go big” before talking about having the “content, community, cloud team, and strategy” in hand. Otherwise, we’ve had little to no information about what Microsoft and Sony are planning for the future, so there’s no telling what that might entail.
We will likely hear about the next Xbox at E3 2019 for what it’s worth, and Sony is rumoured to be hosting a small event to announce the PlayStation 5 in mid-2019. Will either venture as deep into cloud-based game streaming as Google Stadia, which is out this year? Time will tell, so stay tuned for more information.
