While Microsoft and Sony took E3 centre-stage with announcements of motion based controllers and commitments to extend the life-cycle of their respective consoles, the third rival in the console wars may lead them to reveal plans for new hardware, faster than they expected.
The president of the Worldwide studios of Sony Computer Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida, confirmed that the company has been working on a new hardware platform for quite some time. Worldwide Studios are the group of game developers owned by the Japanese electronics giant and Mr. statement. He also added that Sony is already taking on board developer recommendations, suggesting that hardware design is maturing at SCE.
According to Yoshida, Sony has been at work on the new platform since Kaz Hirai took the company over in 2007. The exact quote, provided to a UK trade publication, states, "(Mr. Hirai)...wanted developers in meetings at the very beginning of concepting new hardware, and he demanded SCE people talk to us. We are undergoing many activities that we haven't yet been talking about in public. Some future platform related activities."
So where does this new hardware fit-in? Only a couple of weeks ago, Sony was singing and dancing about Move and explaining, in high technical detail why the PS3 will be with us for the next few decades.
There are two rumoured answers:
The first one suggests that Yoshida is referring to a handheld device which Sony is being cornered into revealing by Nintendo's swift and aggressive presentation of the 3DS. The fact that it is on schedule for delivery next spring, coupled with the positive buzz it generated around E3 may force Sony's hand ..or mouth. PSP owners were happy to know that they held the pinnacle of handheld gaming technology but a 3D gadget that does things their little accessory cannot may change this balance that Sony has been enjoying for quite some time. The new handheld rumour continues and suggests that there are two possible dates to look out for an announcement, Gamescom in Germany (August) or the Tokyo Games Show (September). Sony officials spent a great deal of time, at E3, refusing to respond to questions about a PSP replacement although they did appear to stop short of denying its existence. This rumour has a very short life expectancy as after September it will either be proved false or morph into a ubiquitous news story.
The second rumour (my personal favorite), goes much further and suggests that Sony are maturing the Cell design and plan something big as a PS3 replacement. This one is kind of strange as it is almost a certainty that Sony would be thinking about and possibly designing some new hardware as part of their R&D. Additional strangeness and rumour security is added since any new Sony console (when it arrives) will be a PS3 replacement.
We would recommend that if, under threat of violence, you are forced to pick a rumour, go for the handheld version. There is little evidence that the PS3 and X360 for that matter, are near the end of their life-cycles and new gizmos will provide the life support required to keep them going.
Factor in that Sony is now actually making money from the hardware and it becomes very unlikely that any new living room hardware will surface any time soon. In the mean-time, it is pretty certain that Sony boffins will be hard at work designing the new setup but until one of them learns what a bar is and forgets a prototype on a stool, we are extremely unlikely to hear anything about it.
On the handheld side of gaming however, Nintendo's new experiment seems to have captured the gamer's lazy eye and Sony must be looking at Nintendo as a predator after its PSP owners. Sooner or later, those owners will face a decision, do I like PSP enough to forgo 3D handheld gaming? You can have both but you are more than likely to start buying games for the one you use the most. So look out for Germany in August or Japan in September for a Sony reaction.
