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.
“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 theWall 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 madeearlier 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 likeDestinyandThe Divisionpairing large numbers of players together in a similar fashion to MMO games, the upcoming Xbox One and PC titleCrackdownmakes 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 4passed the PlayStation 3, even though the older system was out for seven years before it was replaced. Sony’s console alsotopped monthly hardware saleson the back of the excellentGod of War.
