Sony’s PlayStation 4 has been around for five years now, which means it’s starting to get a little long in the tooth. But will there be a PlayStation 5? That’s an interesting question, what with shifting gaming trends in recent years. And now there seems to be an answer.
“At this point, what I can say is it’s necessary to have a next-generation hardware,” Sony president Kenichiro Yoshida told the Financial Times for a story published Tuesday. However, Yoshida didn’t say the device would be called the “PlayStation 5.”
The biggest shifts in the gaming world are those from consoles to mobile devices, the rise of online streaming—cloud gaming, as it were—and the emergence of so-called “esports.” The latter trend in particular requires a great deal of processing power, and for that reason it is currently mostly a PC gaming thing.
Both Sony and its traditional arch-rival, the Xbox-toting Microsoft (MSFT), have recently been moving towards support for game-playing across different devices.
A couple weeks ago, Sony (SNEJF) said it was experimenting with letting people play the hit game Fortnite across the PS4, Android, iOS, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows and Mac machines. And Microsoft on Monday announced “Project Xcloud,” which will involve the streaming of Xbox games to consoles, PCs and mobile devices.
Nonetheless, while the dominance of the console-as-a-platform may be fading, Sony appears to believe there’s enough demand to merit at least one more generation.