Sony to Announce PlayStation 4 Later This Month

Rumors, whether true or false, have been floating around about the PlayStation 4 for over a year now. But finally, some solid news has been reported by Sony itself. On February 20, Sony will be hosting an event to announce their long awaited next generation console.

Although the largely successful PlayStation 3 was supposed to be a 10-year system, now, due to popular demand (and Microsoft working on their own console that's rumored to be released later this year) Sony decided that 6 years was enough and it was time to start moving on the new system.

The PlayStation 3 was a huge success for Sony in 2006. Once it was released on November 11th in Japan, a reported 24,000 copies were sold within 24 hours. In America, there was such a frenzy for the then-new console that on the release night, buyers were held at gunpoint, people were stampeded, and there were a few drive-by shootings with BB guns. A little over the top, but that shows how much of a market there is for gaming.

The PS4 is expected to have a built in Blu-ray player, since Sony is the manufacturer and owner of Blu-ray. Another thing that Sony is well known for is reliability. For their PS3's, only about .5%, or 5 out of every 1000 systems broke down over their years of usage, which is far better than the Xbox 360, which struggled in this area with its "red ring of death." The PS4 has been rumored to have more computing power than the Xbox 720 while packing less RAM. Also, reports suggest that 4K graphics and full 1080p 3D will be capable on the new system, but those are just rumors.



This video was released on Thursday to stir up some hype about the PS4.

On Thursday, Sony released a teaser video(above) and tweeted out "see the future." Within minutes reports were flooding out about the Feb. 20th announcement and it had seemed that Sony had achieved their goal of bringing as much attention to the announcement as possible.

Both the Xbox 720 and PS4 are supposed to be released around the beginning of next year. Nothing is set in stone, but Sony has been a struggling company the past year so this console is much needed for their status. As their stock has dramatically risen in the past few weeks with announcements of new smartphones, TV's, and now a new system, it looks like Sony is on the rise once again.