Get your pre-orders ready because the PS6 could be out as early as 2026, with a PS5 Pro model perhaps as early as 2023.
By this time next year the PlayStation 5 should be out, but despite some rumours to the contrary there’ll only be one model, with Sony saying it has no plans for a PS5 Pro until a few years later.
That is how things worked this generation, although since the Pro version (and the Xbox One X) were a new idea at that point there was some speculation that maybe they’d be available from the start.
Masayasu Ito, Sony’s Executive VP of Hardware Engineering, has implied that won’t happened but has said that the PlayStation 5 will have an effective lifespan of six to seven years, with a Pro version coming out somewhere in the middle.
‘In the past, the cycle for a new platform was 7 to 10 years, but in view of the very rapid development and evolution of technology, it’s really a six to seven year platform cycle’, he told Game Informer.
‘Then we cannot fully catch up with the rapid development of the technology, therefore our thinking is that as far as a platform is concerned for the PS5, it’s a cycle of maybe six to seven years. But doing that, a platform lifecycle, we should be able to change the hardware itself and try to incorporate advancements in technology. That was the thinking behind it, and the test case of that thinking was the PS4 Pro that launched in the midway of the PS4 launch cycle.’
As you can see he only implies the existence of the PS5 Pro but by his own logic one would be necessary in order to keep the PlayStation 5 up-to-date with new technology.
That immediately led LetsGoDigital to create a 3D mock-up, as they do for all new Sony patents and rumours, although at this point there’s no indication of what it could possibly look like (although we’re going to take a mad guess and say it’ll be a big black box).
Perhaps the most interesting comment is simply that Ito is talking about PlayStation 6 at all, even if it’s very vaguely.
With the rise of streaming there has to be a serious question as to whether the next generation of consoles will be the last one, but from what he’s saying that’s not how Sony are thinking about things at all. At least not for now anyway.
Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter
MORE: New Sony PS5 patent reveals strange new controller
MORE: PS5 and Xbox Project Scarlett are equally powerful claims insider
MORE: Real PS5 dev kit photos leak but is it really what the PS5 looks like?
