Sony's Kaz Hirai Hints at Xbox 720 Reveal Before PS4

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Too shy to go first, Sony?

While Microsoft is keeping pretty quiet about the next generation of the Xbox, Sony has spoken about the PS4 a number of times over the last couple of weeks. Last week, Sony's vice president of home entertainment, Hiroshi Sakamoto, confirmed to Spanish language site Emol that the company's next generation of PlayStation would see an E3 or earlier announcement. However, it seems that though we may see a PS4 announcement in the next six months, the Xbox 720 may actually be announced before the PS4.

According to Sony's President and CEO Kaz Hirai, the company may actually wait for Microsoft to go first to avoid being one-upped. IGN points to a quote in The Times accredited to Hirai, which reads as follows:

"Why go first, when your competitors can look at your specifications and come up with something better?"

Hirai has a point. Cast your mind back to 2011 and the unveiling of the 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab at Mobile World Congress. You'll remember that the iPad 2 was unveiled shortly after and Samsung felt threatened enough to go back to the drawing board.

"We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate," a Samsung exec was quoted as saying at the time. "Apple made it very thin."

However, while tablets suffer from a relatively short product life cycle, gaming consoles tend to stick around for quite a while. Look at the PS3. It was first launched at the end of 2006. Though it has gone through some changes since then, we haven't seen a completely new PlayStation since then. If Sony's Hiroshi Sakamoto May/June schedule remains true, we learn about the Xbox 720 before E3 as well.

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40 Comments Comment from the forums
  • greghome
    Maybe....it's because of this kind of attitude......there's been a lack of innovation and lack of profitability at Sony lately....

    Reply
  • godfather666
    Are they really able to change much within a short time frame? You can change the price, but I don't know about how much you can change in the specs so late in the game - I'm guessing very little.
    Reply
  • They can't change much in a short timeframe. Maybe HDD capacity, or amount of RAM, the case, etc. He probably just knows that there's no way the PS4 is going be ready before the new XBox, so he's just trying to get good press from an inevitable occurrence.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    I have no doubt that Sony will have hardware that will knock the socks off of the NextBox, and going 2nd on their product announcement is just fanfair so that when MS gives their product announcement that Sony can try and steal their thunder.

    But you know what the lesson learned was this last console generation? Price does not matter (to a point), console sales do not matter, system specs do not matter. The only thing that really truly matters in the console world is the games selection. The Wii was cheap, profitable per sale, and sold tons and tons of units... but there are no (well, to be fair; very few) good games on it, so it was the least profitable platform in the end. The PS3 was the hardware beast, and they managed to track price with the xBox360 in spite of the hardware cost difference... but most of the major releases for the PS3 were also on the xBox. xBox was not the best value in hardware, nor did it have much in the way of innovation, but it simply has games, and has been focused on the GAME ecosystem, and so while the xBox has not exactly broken any records on sales or specs, it enjoys the most active community at the end of it's life cycle because it has the most game sales.

    So Sony, we sadly do not care what your next console looks like. We do not care about your system specs and show-boating. What we want is game selection, which means you need to start kissing some royal developer A$$ and ensure that you have the easiest platform to develop for, with the lowest entry cost, and with the best developer support group. You did it with the PS2, and I still enjoy that platform better than any current console, but unless you can do it again then the PS division will be axed in the process of Mother-Sony restructuring to avoid going out of business.
    Reply
  • k7mm
    PS3 and 360 have not lived up to their hype ...now they are hyping up the new stuff.
    Reply
  • chicofehr
    I got a PC so I'm ready to play the XBOX 1080 and PS4 games now :P
    Reply
  • I think they have done an excellent job of living up to their hype. I have enjoyed both for a number of years. Both have their strengths, but we are talking about 6+ year old hardware now. Considering that fact, I think they are doing extremely well.
    Reply
  • ceeblueyonder
    anyone excited bout this ps4? rumored to have a quadcore amd A10 equivalent cpu and a HD 6670 gpu? i don't think this hardware can even play BF3 in medium settings at 1080p. who cares who announces their consoles first.

    with those kind of specs sony, i am afraid future ps4 games will look almost the same as ps3 games of now. unless i am missing something, it looks like next gent sony ps4 is not next gen but swapped parts or swapped generation.

    i know, it's just called we have a new console and a new number generation.

    the other camp has a "next-gen" like spec sheet with an 8-core cpu from the powerpc line (drool) but afraid the hardware will have crappy quality and i don't even wanna mention that live thing. it's like paying a toll fee to get to nyc and then another fee to get to to say times square. why is that company so evil?
    Reply
  • sna
    ...

    is it too hard to make a new console with high end technology we have today ?

    I think not. so stop being greedy and do it ...

    you dont have to wait ...
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    ceeblueyonderanyone excited bout this ps4? rumored to have a quadcore amd A10 equivalent cpu and a HD 6670 gpu? i don't think this hardware can even play BF3 in medium settings at 1080p. who cares who announces their consoles first.with those kind of specs sony, i am afraid future ps4 games will look almost the same as ps3 games of now. unless i am missing something, it looks like next gent sony ps4 is not next gen but swapped parts or swapped generation. i know, it's just called we have a new console and a new number generation. the other camp has a "next-gen" like spec sheet with an 8-core cpu from the powerpc line (drool) but afraid the hardware will have crappy quality and i don't even wanna mention that live thing. it's like paying a toll fee to get to nyc and then another fee to get to to say times square. why is that company so evil?what rock are you under?
    PS4 and Nextbox look to be very similar in hardware with the exception of the GPU and Ram. This will bring consoles up a gaming performance of approximately a Core2Quad, but without the Ram bottleneck of DDR2. For PC gaming, sure, that is modest, but for console gaming that is a HUGE upgrade, and I don't think that you can discount just how important that is.

    The really important thing is that these next gen consoles will be x86, which means it will be much easier to port games to the PC. This is especially important on the NextBox side of things as there is potential for there to not be any exclusive console titles. I mean, if we are running PC hardware already, what developer would not want to release for both the NextBox and Windows PCs? All that MS has to do is require the use of Win8 to play the games, and they will be sold on the idea.
    Reply