PlayStation chief says the next console is still three years away

By Gabe Gurwin Published May 23, 2018

PlayStation 4 bundle — Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

The PlayStation 4 has been out for nearly five years, and despite its colossal sales figures and library of exclusive games, some players are hankering to hear news about the system’s successor. According to Sony Interactive Entertainment president John Kodera, however, we have a few more years to wait before that happens.

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“We will use the next three years to prepare the next step, to crouch down so that we can jump higher into the future,” Kodera said to a group of reporters, including the Wall Street Journal. “We need to depart from the traditional way of looking at the console life cycle. We’re no longer in a time when you can think just about the console or just about the network like they’re two different things.”

The comments appear to walk back a statement Kodera had made earlier in the week, in which he said the PlayStation 4 was in the “final phase” of its life cycle. With the increased power of the PlayStation 4 Pro, games are capable of running at much higher resolutions and framerates than they were on the standard PlayStation 4, but as the newer system has no true exclusives, it somewhat limits developers’ ability to fully harness its power.

The combination of traditional player-side computing power with cloud-based technology has allowed the current generation of games to do things they wouldn’t normally be able to do. In addition to games like Destiny and The Division pairing large numbers of players together in a similar fashion to MMO games, the upcoming Xbox One and PC title Crackdown makes use of Microsoft’s Azure cloud servers to bring enhanced environmental destruction to multiplayer.

Thus far, Sony hasn’t experimented with this quite as much, relying more on traditional single-player games to take the lead in the console hardware race, but with its PlayStation Now subscription service offering players a way to stream games already, this could feasibly be expanded to offer games not possible on a console alone.

In April, sales of the PlayStation 4 passed the PlayStation 3, even though the older system was out for seven years before it was replaced. Sony’s console also topped monthly hardware sales on the back of the excellent God of War.

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Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

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