Ano♚ther day, another reason for people to start feeling a little dodgy about the upcoming PlayStation 5.
While console releases are typically shrouded in some veil of ambiguity, their reveals are usually not this protracted. Yet we're a quarter of the way through 2020, and we still have no idea when the PlayStation 5 will be hitting store shelves. Some hoped that today's big reveal event would shed some light on that, but alas - noted Dana Carvey character Mark Cerny remained tight-lipped🦋.
The focal p🧸oint of the conference was a technical teardown of the PlayStation 5. Cerny explained the fallacy of relying on teraflops as a measure of performance, broke down the impressive audio tech under the hood, and compared the console's performance to the PS4's. It was an in🌟teresting, if a bit dry, presentation in spite of what angry tweets might lead you to believe.
Yet as the PlayStation 5 release ℱdraws closer and closer, a tighter release window would've been a nice reveal - especially considering that this thing was released on PlayStation's YouTube. While this was never going to be a Nintendo Direct adjacent event, Sony propped it up as such to some extent. Doing that without any clear idea of༒ when this thing is coming out, or what it even looks like for that matter, was a bit of a bad move on their end.
So, where does this leave consumers? Honestly, basically the same place they stood before today, in some ways. Info that would be relevant to people ready to drop several hundred bucks on one of these suckers was all but left out of the conference. While it's easy for tech nerds, devs, and game journalists to recognize the significance of this presentation, the average consumer wants games, a price point, ꦍand a release date. Sony made a bit of a miscalculation when it came to putting this out for general audiences, as this info was originally intended for GDC.
Speaking of which, we're still not sure how COVID-19 is going to affect the release of the PlayStation 5. With a cancelled GꦉD🐻C and E3, amid reports of economic downturn and a crackdown on imports and exports, there's a good chance we may not see the PS5 for a while. In that case, it may be best that we don't have much to look forward to at the moment. That way, we're not clamoring for a release date before this global crisis gets solved.