PlayStation 4: all the info on Sony’s next generation hardware

PlayStation Now could be the future of gaming, but you’re going to need a proprietary controller to play. Though Sony has announced that the streaming game service will come to tablets and smartphones — perhaps even non-Sony devices — the company doesn’t plan to let you use a touchscreen. To play PS3 games, PlayStation marketing VP John Koller tells us, you need to have the gamepad they were originally designed for. “You need to have the DualShock to be able to play,” says Koller.

Sony tells us a DualShock 4 will do for the PlayStation 4, and the PlayStation Vita handheld buttons can continue to work the same way they do now. Sony’s new Bravia TVs will specifically require a DualShock 3 controller, though — and so will tablets and smartphones, according to the executive.

The PlayStation 4 may not be the most important part of Sony’s gaming strategy anymore. At CES 2014, Sony has just announced PlayStation Now, a service that will bring streaming PlayStation games not only to PS4, but also PS3, PlayStation Vita, and even televisions, tablets, and smartphones.

It’s the company’s public-facing brand for Gaikai, the cloud gaming technology it purchased in June of 2012, which the company previously said would bring PS3 games to the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita later this year. Sony says the technology is already working here at CES, with attendees able to try critically acclaimed action title The Last of Us here in Vegas. The full service will let users rent games or pay for a subscription that will let them “explore a range of titles.” Sony will launch a closed beta in the United States at the end of the month, and plans to roll out the service more broadly by the end of this summer.

The next generation of console gaming is here. Sony launched its PlayStation 4 last week, and Microsoft launches the Xbox One today, ushering in a new battle between the hardware titans.

Over the last several months, we’ve become very familiar with the exterior design of both consoles. But with both devices now available, iFixit has torn them open for a look at everything that’s packed inside. Both companies expect these products to remain on the market for up to a decade, so the Xbox One and PS4 will be powering the games you play for years to come.

Sony has announced a new “remote play” feature for the PS Vita, which will allow PlayStation 4 games to be played directly on the Vita. “Our long term goal is to make every PS4 title playable on the Vita,” the company says. It’s a strategy similar to what we’ve seen on the Nintendo Wii U and Nvidia’s Project Shield, where home console or PC games can be streamed to a smaller second screen. Though we’re not sure exactly how it works yet, Sony says it’s integrated Gaikai technology that “effectively makes it a game server.” Unfortunately, there appears to be no similar support for tablets, which effectively limits remote play to people who have gone all-in on Sony’s ecosystem.

Update: Sony’s official press release states that the “long-term goal” is to make “almost every PS4 title” playable on the Vita using the remote play option over Wi-Fi. That’s hedging a bit from what we heard in today’s presentation, but there’s still a lot of time for Sony to get this working before the PlayStation 4’s planned launch in late 2013.

Sony has announced the DualShock 4, a new controller with a touchpad and headphone jack. The controller will come with a dedicated share button and a light bar that identifies players or changes color during play, and it essentially looks like a sleeker version of the classic DualShock. The light bar, which rotates between three different colors, can actually be used to provide feedback during gameplay — to notify a player if their health is running low, for example.

The DualShock 4 packs some additional surprises inside, including a six-axis sensor and a built-in speaker. A 3D camera — dubbed the PlayStation 4 Eye — can also track the controller’s motion from the light bar, sensing depth. Overall, the system is much like the potential prototype controller we’ve been seeing over the past several days, and it’s designed to take advantage of new features, like an instant suspension mode that will save games and put the console in low-power mode. The share button is being touted as a particularly important feature: pressing it lets users broadcast their game live to friends, who can then post to your screen or even take over the controller if you allow it. Of course, we still have no idea what the PlayStation 4 will actually look like, so it’s hard to tell how the controller will fit with the console itself.

Tomorrow evening, Sony is widely expected to unveil its fourth-generation PlayStation, which could become Sony’s biggest product launch of the year. In fact, it could be Sony’s biggest launch for the next half decade.

That’s thanks largely to the PlayStation brand’s proud lineage: the original PlayStation put arcade-quality gaming into homes around the world, the PlayStation 2 drove DVD adoption and amassed the most comprehensive video game library of all time, and the ambitious PlayStation 3 is arguably the main reason we still have Blu-ray today. So there’s a lot at stake for Sony’s all-but-certain PlayStation 4 — or whatever the name may be — when it’s announced tomorrow evening. PlayStations are more than just game machines; they’re supposed to be revolutionary pieces of hardware that push the boundaries of technical innovation in the living room.

Mere days before the successor to the PlayStation 3 is rumored to be announced, The Wall Street Journal has published a few more tidbits on what we might see. According to anonymous sources, Sony will be expanding on the console’s current social features, allowing users to share achievements through Facebook and Twitter and upload gameplay footage to YouTube. These features were already present to some extent on the PlayStation 3, but we could be seeing a better experience in the future, in line with previous reports that the new PlayStation would emphasize social gaming experiences.

The Journal also tentatively filled in some of the gaps in Sony’s plans for extra features and its acquired cloud gaming service Gaikai: we’re now hearing that Sony head Kaz Hirai led the deal to buy the company, and the Journal has reiterated that the new PlayStation would work through a combination of optical disks and streaming. Sources suggest that “Sony’s new console may also allow users to compete against others using different hardware, such as smartphones and other portable devices.” It’s not specified how this will work, but it’s possible it refers to streaming multiplayer games onto other platforms, something that was initially a selling point for cloud gaming. Sony has told us to come “see the future” on February 20th, so it’s possible we’ll have hard answers very soon.

Last June, Sony purchased Gaikai, a company that can stream games — delivering them over the internet in real time from remote servers, by sending compressed video frames. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports what many have suspected for months: Sony will use the service to stream games to the next PlayStation game console, which the company is widely expected to reveal on February 20th. However, according to the publication, Sony won’t necessarily use Gaikai to deliver brand-new games. Those will reportedly still be delivered on optical disc. Instead, the next PlayStation will allegedly bring existing PlayStation 3 games to the new system using the streaming technology.

Previous generations of PlayStation have offered backward compatibility with games built for previous systems — you could put a PS1 disk in a PS2, for instance, and PS2 games worked in some PS3s — but the next PlayStation is expected to use AMD x86 chips, which wouldn’t be compatible with the architecture used in previous systems. By hosting earlier generations of games on servers and streaming them instead, this could be a way to ensure some form of backwards compatibility despite the AMD chips.

It was only yesterday that Destructoid gave the world its first glimpse at a purported controller for Sony’s next-gen PlayStation console. Since then, other publications including IGN and Kotaku have confirmed the image as legitimate while being careful to emphasize we’re likely seeing a prototype design that could differ substantially with what Sony is expected to unveil next week. Yet the same controller has turned up in a second photo, this time from another angle. Thankfully the handles appear a fair bit longer here than in the original shot, and you’re again able to make out those concave analog sticks, an LED strip at the top, and what looks to be an LCD or some type of touchpad at the controller’s center.

New in this shot, however, is what appears to be a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack situated at the bottom. We can only presume that’s intended for a voice chat accessory. Additionally, Sony seems to have separated the start and select buttons to a wide degree; they’re faintly visible next to the directional pad and triangle button, respectively. Unfortunately the sourcing for this particular photo is a bit shaky. It’s been posted to a few gaming forums so far, but it’s unclear where exactly this picture first originated. We’ve put it through some tests and see no clear signs of doctoring or Photoshop deception. We’re no closer to knowing if this is the same hardware consumers will find packed in with the inevitable PlayStation 4, but the answer should be clear come next Wednesday.

Sony already announced that we’d “see the future” of the PlayStation at its event next week, and now a photo has emerged that may be our first look at a prototype controller for its new console. Destructoid has the image, which shows a DualShock-style controller with what appears to be a touchpad on top, and a blue light on its back. The addition of a touchpad lines up with previous reports about the PlayStation 4 controller, while the blue light bears a strong resemblance to that found on Sony’s PlayStation Move motion controllers. As Polygon points out, Sony was granted a patent for a Move-equipped controller back in 2012.

Kotaku is also reporting that one of its sources have confirmed the image is real — but cautions that since this is a prototype, the final form factor of the controller could be different. Either way, we have a sneaking suspicion we’ll see the new PlayStation controller in all its glory on February 20th.

The PlayStation 4 will launch this year for over 40,000 yen (about $428), according to a report in major Japanese daily the Asahi Shimbun. That’s the first clear indication we’ve gotten on how much the new system might cost, and suggests that while Sony isn’t pricing the PS4 too aggressively next to the likes of the Wii U, it may have learned its lesson from the shaky PlayStation 3 launch.

For comparison, upon release in 2006 the PS3 cost around 60,000 yen in its more expensive configuration, and $599 in the US. Meanwhile, the cheapest PS3 now costs 24,980 yen in Japan versus $269 in the US. Were the PS4 to launch at 40,000 yen in Japan, we’d expect an American price point of around $400 or more.

Following Sony’s announcement of its February 20th event — at which the company is expected to unveil the next PlayStation — more details about the next-generation console have surfaced. According to Edge, the next PlayStation, reportedly codenamed Orbis, will be more powerful than Microsoft’s new Xbox and feature a redesigned controller.

In line with Sony’s past PlayStation controller refreshes, Edge claims the new controller will remain the same size and shape as the DualShock, but will have a small touchpad — based on technology used in the Vita’s rear touchpad — in place of the current Start, Select, and PlayStation buttons. The publication’s sources also say the controller will have a new “Share” button that will allow users to share screenshots and video online, which lines up well with reports from The Wall Street Journal that Sony plans to “incorporate more social gaming aspects into the new machine.” Sony is also rumored to be working on a new version of its PlayStation Eye peripheral, says the report.

Sony said we’d ‘see the future’ of PlayStation on February 20th, and it appears to be true: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the company will not only reveal the next PlayStation at the event, but actually put the new video game console on sale later this year. According to the publication’s anonymous sources, both the next PlayStation and Microsoft’s next game system will compete head to head going into the holiday season.

Though Sony CEO Kaz Hirai and others had originally telegraphed that the next PlayStation might not be ready as soon as the next Xbox, it appears to have been a feint. We may see what the so-called PlayStation Orbis has to offer in as few as three weeks. In the meanwhile, you can pick through Sony’s video teaser to see what could be our first glimpse at the game system.

Sony has just announced a PlayStation-related event for February 20th at 6pm, and it looks like we’ll get our first look at the company’s next-generation home console. In a tweet, Sony says that the PlayStation Meeting 2013 will allow us to “see the future” and an attached video teaser may even have given us a glimpse of the hardware. The video is mostly abstract renderings of the classic PlayStation button symbols, but there are brief flashes where it looks like something else could be going on. In any case, we could have less than three weeks left until we see the next PlayStation, reportedly codenamed Orbis, for real.

Additionally, noted industry analyst Michael Pachter says Sony has also extended invitations to company investors for the upcoming event. We can’t be positive a PlayStation 4 is on the agenda, but clearly whatever Sony is preparing to share is rather important. Prior to today’s teaser, many believed Sony would be revealing its latest console at this year’s E3 conference, if not later. CEO Kaz Hirai has hinted that Sony might repeat its last-gen approach: let the competition go first, and follow up with a more powerful machine. The PlayStation 3 was released an entire year after Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which left Sony with an uphill battle to eventually catch up. Microsoft employee Larry Hryb ramped up hype surrounding a successor to the 360 earlier this month, too, leading many to expect an unveiling of the next Xbox before Sony made its move.

The only thing we actually know about Sony’s PlayStation 4 is that we shouldn’t expect it anytime soon, but rumors are starting to pop: one week ago, Kotaku heard that a “PlayStation Orbis” might include both an AMD processor and AMD graphics, and now IGN’s trusted sources say that’s absolutely correct. According to the rumor, the next PlayStation will include AMD’s A8-3850 APU and Radeon HD 7670 discrete graphics — both of which are included in PCs that you can buy today.

If you’re familiar with AMD’s chips, you probably know that the quad-core 2.9GHz A8-3850 already has integrated graphics on board, but IGN says the console will actually use those two graphics solutions in tandem for increased performance: an asymmetric CrossFire configuration that’s already possible (but not that popular) with the company’s off-the-shelf desktop parts. It could also mean a cooler, quieter PS4 if the discrete GPU can be turned off.

Though Nintendo has been strangely forthcoming with details on its next-generation consoles — the Wii U is launching this holiday season, about 18 months after it was first unveiled — both Sony and Microsoft have been more characteristically quiet on future plans. That hasn’t stopped a number of unconfirmed reports from trickling out about the next Xbox “Durango,” and now Kotaku has what it claims to be details on the PlayStation 3 successor, Orbis, coming in time for holidays 2013.

That isn’t to say Orbis is a codename destined to be dropped before launch — “Orbis Vitae” (i.e. PlayStation Vita) is Latin for “circle of life,” and Sony may not be able to resist such great wordplay. Internals reportedly include an AMD x64 CPU and AMD Southern Islands GPU that can output at 4096 x 2160, which is in the range of what’s considered 4k resolution. (Sony’s home theater division is already toying with 4k content scaling and 4k home theater projectors.)