Sony Officially Announces Playstation 5, Releasing in 2020

October 9, 2019

Written by Jamie Galea

While 2019 has been a quiet year for Sony, 2020 is set to be enormous, with the company announcing the first major details of its upcoming next-generation console: Playstation 5, which will be releasing sometime next year. While the bulk of the announcement was announced via Wired (which also had the initial details of Sony’s next-gen efforts), Sony’s Playstation Blog also shares a few additional details, mostly regarding the still unnamed controller, which may or may not be called the DualShock 5.

The first detail is that rumble is gone from the controller, which will be replaced with haptic feedback, something Sony claims offers a much broader sense of feedback. Secondly, the controller will have what is being described as “adaptative triggers”, where the L2 & R2 buttons will allow players to feel more tactile sensations such as drawing a bow or accelerating a car on rocky terrain; all of which sounds similar to what the Xbox One controller currently offers. Sony are also promising a much larger battery than the DualShock 4, and the controller will be charged via USB-C.

While we previously knew the PS5 would handle its storage via an SSD, Sony’s went into much greater detail as to what this would actually mean for consumers. Games will still need to be installed if you’re using a physical disc, with the PS5 optical discs topping out at 100GB. However, because of the speed of the SSD and flexibility it offers, Sony are changing up how game data is managed with the system. Instead of treating games as “one big block of data”, as described by system architecht Mark Cerny, users will have more control as to what actually gets installed. Whether or not this means allowing users to only install single or multiplayer is something that wasn’t clarified.

Other smaller details confirmed are a brand new user interface and the optical drive allowing you to play 4K Blu-Ray discs. Previously Sony confirmed that the console will be backwards compatibile with Playstation 4 games. No games were announced as part of this, but Bluepoint Games are confirmed to be working on something mysterious.

With 2020 nearly upon us, it’ll be fascinating to see what else comes out of a brand new generation.