Reports claim that Sony’s next generation home console has already been in development since 2010, after a CV of a R&D director at Sony Computer Entertainment America showed up on LinkedIn.
News in the video game industry comes from many sources and more often than not the public knows about new games, storylines, release dates and other important details about upcoming games even before they are officially announced.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 saw their entire single-player campaign storyline leaked onto the internet months ahead of the game’s release and Amazon.com has a habit of announcing games through price listings on their website before the publisher or developer has.
However, the most reliable source is often through the CV of a person who worked on a particular project, which is the case this time around. Attila Vass, who apart from having one of the coolest names we’ve heard in a while, also happens to be a Research and Development director at Sony Computer Entertainment America.
Attila’s CV mentions he has worked on the “Next Generation PlayStation”, with his focus being on working on the console’s “Graphics Library” and “Security” as well. What is interesting about that post is that the date specified for his work on the console began in August 2010.
So from that one could reach the conclusion Sony has been working on the PlayStation 4 for almost two years. At the same time one could also speculate that the ‘next generation console’ could also have been the PlayStation Vita, Sony’s second-generation portable gaming console, however, that is not the case as Attila posted his work on the Vita separately.
His CV also highlighted some of the details of his work on the next-gen console, “I worked on graphics ( COLLADA, PSGL ) and a lot of network related technologies ( advertising, telemetry, PVRs ) for the Playstation2-x, PSP, Vita and Next Generation platforms.”
One other factor that adds credibility to the story is the fact that the above mentioned summary has since been removed from Attila’s CV, which usually happens when damage control kicks in following information getting out when it is not supposed to.
Sony had already confirmed that it was working on a next-gen console, so that news came as no surprise, but the fact that it has been in development for two years should help everyone gauge when they can expect the console to be both announced and released.
It seems that a late 2013, early 2014 release date is possible however, 2014 seems the safest bet for the PlayStation 4 to hit store shelves. As for the announcement of the console, well it seems almost certain that Sony will announce the game during the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo.
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