Usually when a convention is being held, it’s a little difficult to keep track of everything that’s going on … and this bit of news almost fell through the cracks! On August 20th, website “LetsGoDigital” posted news of a design patent it discovered for an unknown device by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The device is designed by Yusuhiro Ootori (an engineer for the company and the product designer of the PS4 Pro) and speculation around the internet largely hovered around it being a PlayStation 5 development kit.
Now, when a new design document usually leaks online, people love to start speculating if it’s real or not. If it is real, people then contemplate whether it gets used or not. Thankfully, this might be an actual device that is being used and thanks to the power of Twitter, Codemasters senior artist, Matthew Stott, confirmed in a now-deleted tweet that the device is in fact a PlayStation 5 development kit.
“It’s a dev kit, we have some in the office,” Stott said in the tweet.
It should be noted that development kits generally are different in appearance to the hardware that is sold to consumers. The PS4 dev kit was mostly a black box while the PS3 dev kit looked liked like a VCR, but instead of a place for a VHS tape to go, it had two places for HDDs, a normal slot, and another for the dev kit tools. Usually, the only thing that has the console similar to the dev kit is its color and a tiny bit of its design. You can take a look at the design of the dev kit below.
Looking at this dev kit, it looks a little weird … Looking closer to a projector or at least something that’s a throwback to the early 90s than anything else. The PS5 is using an AMD Zen 2 CPU and since those can get extra hot, these dev kits have extra vents on them so they can cool and breathe better than the PS4 and the PS4 Pro so devs don’t have to worry about the kit overheating when they are working on their projects.
If anything, these dev kits are now out in the wild and developers are using them to create those next-generation games for the PS5. We still have no word on a release date for the system, only a guess that it will possibly launch sometime after April 2020 but no one will be 100% sure until Sony makes a public announcement. Until then, all we can do is speculate. Overall though (and I am just speculating here), if the dev kits look like this, we might end up getting brand new PS5 news from Sony soon as this looks like a more finalized model version. Hopefully, Sony will announce something at their PlayStation Experience so we can all stop speculating on the system (including its name … we call it the PS5 but we haven’t heard its official name yet) and focus on what games will launch with the system.
That’s all we have on this piece of tech, but again and remember — this is a dev kit and not the “official” version as no actual nor official console has been announced thus far.
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