Sony is officially confirming its next PlayStation 5 event will be held on Thursday, June 4th. The event will begin at 4PM ET / 1PM PT, and Sony is promising “a look at the future of gaming on PlayStation 5.” It will run for “a bit more than an hour,” and feature “a first look at the games you’ll be playing after PlayStation 5 launches this holiday,” according to Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment.
“The games coming to PS5 represent the best in the industry from innovative studios that span the globe. Studios, both larger and smaller, those newer and those more established, all have been hard at work developing games that will showcase the potential of the hardware,” says Ryan. “This digital showcase will run for a bit more than an hour and, for the first time, we will all be together virtually experiencing the excitement together.”
Sony’s PS5 event comes as the video game industry prepares for two of its biggest new product launches in nearly a decade. Sony’s PS5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X are slated to be released in time for the holiday shopping season, promising sharper and more intricate visuals, faster gameplay and new titles such as Microsoft’s Halo Infinite space war epic.
The game console launches come at a complicated time. Governments around the world have pushed citizens to shelter in place, slowing economic activity and shuttering businesses. As a result, more than 40 million people in the US have filed unemployment claims as the country faces one of the worst economic crashes in a century.
Sony has so far unveiled PS5 specs, a logo, and a new wireless controller for its next-gen console. Sony has not yet shown off the PS5 console itself, and it’s not clear if that will change at the June 4th event.
The PS5 will feature a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU clocked at 3.5GHz (variable frequency) and a custom GPU based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture hardware that promises 10.28 teraflops and 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz (also variable frequency).
