Confirmado por el Wall Street Journal y EDGE.
"The PlayStation meeting will be about the future of the PlayStation business"
http://us.playstation.com/meeting2013/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-3GMHIgR-U"
Yes, Sony Will Announce the PlayStation 4 on February 20th"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 65276.html
Sony Corp. is planning to unveil its next-generation home videogame console during a February event, showing off a successor to its current PlayStation 3 system.
The Japanese electronics giant Thursday unveiled plans for a special PlayStation-themed event set for Feb. 20, teasing fans to "see the future" at the event. People familiar with the matter have said the new device will make its debut there, beating Microsoft Corp. to the punch in announcing its own next-generation game machine.
Sony's device will be released later this year, these people said, and will spar against Microsoft's own machine, which is also expected to be released by the holidays.
Sony's updated console's arrival comes as the console videogame industry has entered a tailspin. Sales of new videogames, consoles and accessories at U.S. retail shops fell 22% in December when compared with the same time a year prior, according to surveys by industry watcher NPD Group.
In another sign of the difficult environment for traditional videogame machines, Nintendo Co. slashed sales forecasts for its new home console, the Wii U, earlier this week. After launching its first new home console in six years in November, Nintendo said Wii U sales disappointed during the holiday shopping season. The company is now forecasting plans to sell 4 million units versus an earlier estimate for 5.5 million units.
The videogame industry is undergoing a sea change. While videogames used to be limited to dedicated game machines and personal computers, the proliferation of smartphones and other Internet connected devices is opening the floodgates to free or inexpensive games.
Such shifts in consumer behavior and the aging consoles—the Xbox 360 debuted in 2005 and the PS3 a year later—are weighing on game sales, which have contracted every month since December of 2011. Further, Electronic Arts Inc. said the console industry's packaged goods sales fell by about a fifth last year.
In a nod to the changes afoot in the industry, Sony is planning to incorporate more social gaming aspects into the new machine, people familiar with the matter said. Also, while hardware improvements were a key focus of past console upgrades, Sony is more focused this time on the changes in how users interact with the machine, these people said.
When developing the PlayStation, Sony had considered removing its optical disk drive, opting instead to require gamers to download titles over the Internet, people familiar with the matter said. But concerns over the size of videogame files, and slow Web connections in some countries led Sony to scrap the plan, they added. Microsoft made a similar decision for its console as well.
Complicating the design of the new device will be the likely inclusion of chips designed by Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which people familiar with the matter said have been used in prototypes. The chip is separate from the technology Sony currently relies upon for its PlayStation 3, known as the Cell chip, which was developed jointly with International Business Machines Corp. and Toshiba Corp. The move would both introduce compatibility concerns with existing games, built to run on the Cell chip, while also ending a long-running partnership with Nvidia Corp., which supplies graphics chips for the current PlayStation.
In Sony's efforts to beef up its videogame offerings, it purchased Gaikai Inc. for $380 million last year. The company lets gamers play visually sophisticated games through a Web browser, without the need for specialized hardware or graphics circuits. Gaikai's technology runs games in a data center and then streams the images over the Internet.
The PlayStation 3 was a technological marvel when it was released in November 2006. While it has sold more than 70 million units since its debut, the PS3 didn't dominate the industry in the way that its predecessors did. Initially, the machines gave consumers sticker shock, launching two models at $500 and $600. Even at that price, the console was selling at a loss, forcing the company to incur massive losses.
Over time, Sony brought down the PS3's price and improved the machine's profit margins, but it still trails Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360 in overall units shipped.
"PlayStation 4 will be more powerful than the next Xbox, will ship with a redesigned controller and launch by the end of the year"
http://www.edge-online.com/news/playstation-4-revealed/Development sources with working knowledge of both next generation consoles have told us that PlayStation 4 will be more powerful than the next Xbox, will ship with a redesigned controller and launch by the end of the year in Japan and the US. PlayStation 4’s European launch will follow in early 2014.
Sony is set to reveal its next PlayStation on Wednesday February 20th at an event dubbed ‘see the future’. Sony Computer Entertainment released a teaser video last night to announce the event. Below, our sources revealed what to expect from PlayStation 4.
The controller
Sources close to the hardware have revealed to us that PS4 will ship with a redesigned controller which is the same size as an existing DualShock but features a small touchpad in place of the existing Select, Start and PS buttons. The tech is based on Vita’s rear touchpad, and is similarly responsive in use.
A new Share button on the controller will, when pressed, launch a new feature that will allow screenshots and video to be distributed online. The PS4 hardware will continually record the most recent 15 minutes of onscreen action (with no processing penalty, claims our source), which users will then be able to edit and broadcast via the Internet.
The launch
We’re told that PlayStation 4 will launch in Japan and the US by Christmas, with a Euro rollout following in early 2014, the delay attributed to the complexities involved in European distribution. Alongside the console, Sony will also introduce a new, improved iteration of its PlayStation Eye peripheral, which remains compatible with the PlayStation Move controller. Move will be available at launch, but it’s not clear yet whether it will be bundled with the hardware.
The specification
Sony has already earned an enormous amount of goodwill among studios working with PS4 development hardware. Privately, Sony representatives have conceded that the company made a mistake in creating such esoteric architecture for PS3, and its strategy for PS4 gives developers more opportunities this time around, notably because the hardware is much more PC-like in its makeup than PS3.
We have confirmed with sources that recently leaked tech specs are accurate. Though Durango devkits offer 8GB of DDR3 RAM, compared to Orbis’s 4GB, Sony’s GDDR5 solution is capable of moving data at 176 gigabytes per second, which should eliminate the sort of bottlenecks that hampered PS3 game performance. Importantly, we’ve learned that Sony has told developers that it is pushing for the final PS4 RAM to match up to Microsoft’s 8GB.
Both platforms are driven by eight-core AMD CPUs clocked at 1.6GHz, with Microsoft opting for a D3D11.x GPU from an unknown source and Sony utilising a more capable solution in AMD’s ‘R10XX’ architecture, alongside the so-called ‘Liverpool’ system-on-chip.
It’s clear Sony has designed a system that, on paper, outperforms Microsoft’s next Xbox. One source familiar with both platforms tells us that in real terms Sony’s console is “slightly more powerful” and “very simple to work with”.
Ultimately, the performance differences between the two consoles will have as much bearing on multiplatform releases as the differences between PS3 and 360 – very little – but Sony will be expecting big-budget firstparty releases such as the PS4 Uncharted sequel to demonstrate its console’s superiority.