Sony was pretty early with the PS4 announcement, when you consider that when they finally talked to the world about their newest console, they didn’t even have a proper console to show the world- just games running on the targeted specs, and their new DualShock 4 controller. Speaking at the Develop conference, Sony’s Andrew House admitted that Sony had been in a bit of a rush to announce the PS4 as soon as possible- before Microsoft announced the Xbox One, as a matter of fact.
“I think we were probably earlier in the announce than we have been previously, and that was very deliberate,” House admitted. “I wanted to be out there first with the first announcement for this generation so you’ve got an opportunity to stake the ground and hopefully take something of a leadership position. Again, we’d had the experience of launching later than our competitor and that played very heavily to many of the thought processes and decisions made about PlayStation 4.”
So it was basically just establishing the PS4 as the first console to be synonymous with next gen that caused Sony to scramble to reveal the PS4 so ahead of time. That was it, really.
