Playstation 4 fever peaks ahead of mystery Sony event

Sony is holding a Playstation event this month, refreshing rumours of a PS4 reveal

James Etherington-SmithFebruary 1, 2013

On 20 February 2013, in New York, Sony will host its first Playstation meeting since it unveiled the PS Vita in 2011.

Prior to that, the event in 2005 revealed the PS3, while the 1999 meeting unveiled the PS2.

Invites have been sent out to the press, sparking a fresh wave of speculation that that Sony will be unveiling a successor to its 77-million selling PlayStation 3.

According to Reuters, Sony spokesperson Masaki Tsukakoshi merely said “We will be talking about the Playstation business.”

The backdrop of all this is a console industry having to tend with the rise of smartphones and tablet PCs as legitimte gaming devices. Illustrating the struggle is Nintendo, who this week forecast losses for the second year running as their Wii U console isn’t gaining as much traction as they’d hoped.

IDC gaming research manager Lewis Ward predicted that consoles will retain their strongholds in homes while expanding to include other digital entertainment.

“The console ecosystem is in a state of flux since these platforms need to support an ever-growing array of non-gaming features and services at the same time that game distribution and monetization is moving in a digital direction,” Ward said.

“It doesn’t appear that alternative platforms — set-top boxes from cable companies, Web-connected smart TVs and so on — are positioned to materially disrupt the trajectory of the ‘big 3′ console OEMs in 2013 or 2014.”

Videogame industry sales should be bolstered by the arrival of next-generation videogame consoles from Sony and Microsoft, according to Ward.

“With the advent of eighth-generation consoles, starting with the Wii U, historical norms strongly imply that game disk revenue will stop bleeding in 2013 and rise substantively in 2014,” he said in the report.