PlayStation 5 Won’t Release Before April 2020

By Brian Crecente

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – The PlayStation 5 won’t be released during Sony’s 2019 fiscal year, which ends in March 2020, the company said Friday as part of its year-end earnings report according to a Wall Street Journal reporter .

The company also noted that PlayStation 4 sales dropped over the fiscal year that just ended and that the company expects the sales will continue to drop in the 2019 fiscal year.

The news comes a month after Sony released the first official details for the next-gen PlayStation , which it said may or may not be named the .

In April, Sony’s Mark Cerny said that the next console will support ray tracing graphics and include a high-speed solid-state hard drive.

Cerny, who acted as the lead system architect for the PlayStation 4 and for the upcoming console, said that the coming console will be getting a hardware boost, in part from an improved CPU. The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The system will also have a custom unit for 3D audio that Cerny anticipates will make a big difference in the audio experience.

The system will also be getting a new GPU, a custom version from Radeon’s Navi lineup that will support ray tracing. But the most important upgrade for the new console will be its high-speed solid-state hard drive, Cerny said. You can read a detailed breakdown of what all of this tech will mean in this report from Variety.

While neither Microsoft nor Nintendo have officially announced new hardware, rumors have both announcing or releasing new consoles this year.

Microsoft is expected to unveil its new Xbox at E3 this summer and Nintendo is expected to release a new version of the Switch this year.