Expectations over PlayStation 5 (PS5) and Xbox Two are high largely because most consumers see PlayStation 4 (PS4) and Xbox One as the last breed of consoles. Speculations abound that both Sony and Microsoft will move gaming into a whole new level with such buzz words as virtual reality and cloud figuring prominently.
Play-Mag reports that predictions on Playstation 5 rolled in as early as pre-PS4 and pre-XBox One. Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada's is among them. "I think in the future things will be played on the service, rather than on the hardware," Harada said. "The Cloud is often mentioned, and if cloud services progress, the time when only the name of the service will remain will come some day."
"The PS5 probably won't have a main console, but just the screen and controller. So what remains will be just the name of the service. It could be named just "PlayStation network". Steam is defined a platform, but it's not a hardware platform. It's the name of the service."
Things are definitely moving along. Although Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida declared in October 2015 that Playstation 5 does not and will not exist, Playstation Lifestyle reports that Three Fields Entertainment Chief Technical Officer Paul Ross spoke of seeing "Dangerous Golf" on PS5 and Xbox Two. "Okay, what does a PlayStation 5 game look like," Ross said. "What does an Xbox Two game look like? And how can we start to build for that future now?"
"So what does a PS5 game look like," Ross continued. "With PS4 we've seen some fidelity put into the worlds, but PS5's going to be about more dynamic worlds, far more interactive worlds that are more believable in the way they behave."
Yoshida did say previously that PS5 and its capability will depend largely on the requirements of game creators and their vision. "It's really up to the game creator," Yoshida stated. "If they still feel that we need more machine power - 'We want to realize this and that and that, but we cannot do [it] with PS4′ - if that's the case, there's a good reason to have PS5, so that developers can create their vision."
Express points out that with the advent of the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR game play is changing in a big way. The Oculus Rift, which launch date is slated for March 28 has an estimated price of $599 or £499. Its first-day supply sold out within 14 minutes. A Swiss retailer estimated that PS VR will cost around £347.
Play-Mag reports that a leak on the PS VR release was seen on the site of VR company Vrse before it was pulled out immediately after. Based on the leak, PS VR will be released in April 2016.
In the meantime, although popular projections place PS5 and Xbox Two availability seven years down the line, these future-gen may hit the shelves sooner. The Guardian reports Twitch's Emmett Shear pointed out that the upgrade cycle for Playstation and Xbox tend to be shorter. "The problem is, the seven-year upgrade lifecycle doesn't work in the face of the two-year upgrade cycles for every other hardware platform," Shear said. "It's so intrinsically built into how consoles get manufactured and made and the full business model, that I'd be surprised to see another generation."
"They're going to have to change form," Shear continued. "You can already see this on both Xbox and PlayStation where there's a tighter upgrade loop for both the operating systems and the games. This is the first step toward being able to iterate the hardware platform. I could imagine a version 1.1 product from both Microsoft and Sony which adds in slightly more speed and slightly more memory very similar to how phones and tablets work today. I think it's going to look more like the mobile phone market over time."
