With Sony electing to skip E3 2019 and some new – possibly dubious – photos surfacing, speculation seems to point to a Christmas 2019 release with a potential unveiling at PlayStation Experience 2019. Sony has already confirmed that a successor to the PlayStation 4 is in the works.

Analyst Hideki Yasuda from the Osaka-based firm Ace Economic Research Institute believes the “PS5 will be introduced at the end of 2019” as he said in a report on Sony’s financial performance.

Development kits for Sony’s PlayStation 5 have reportedly been in the hands of third-party developers for the better part of 2018 and now, we’re getting a glimpse of what the next-gen hardware may look like.

Russian tech site Rozetked, which has an established track record for leaking tech gadgets, has published photos of an alleged PlayStation 5 prototype. Rozetked couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of the images, in fact, it is now reporting that it believes the photos are fakes.

The PlayStation 5 is rumored to feature an eight-core AMD Ryzen CPU with a retail price point of around $500. A patent application continuation from earlier this month hints at the possibility that a future controller design could feature a touchscreen display.

And in response…Microsoft is planning a PlayStation-killer Xbox Two.

Codenamed Scarlett, the Xbox Two will apparently be armed with a PS5-pummeling super weapon designed to achieve just one thing – break Sony PlayStation’s current domination in the console market. (More than twice as many PlayStation 4s have been sold compared to the Xbox One.)

The result, as reported by GameReactor, is that Microsoft has not only loaded the Xbox Two with new, benchmark-setting hardware and next-generation features like Xbox All Access, but has also purportedly started to write blank cheques to its game studios so that they can make the titles of their “wildest dreams.”

Xbox Two concept artwork

The GameReactor piece reports on comments made by YouTuber boogie2988, who recounts how he had a conversation with Xbox’s Mike Ybarra where these comments were made:

“He [Mike] said we basically went in there to those companies and said: ‘what project do you wanna make?’ And they are like ‘what’s our budget?’ And he’s ‘I don’t think you understand, that’s not our question, our question is what games do you want to make? We are Microsoft and we have the budget, we just want to know what game you want to do, what are your wildest dreams…'”

While this could be taken as fervid fanboy flim-flam, it would make sense given that Microsoft has been buying up prominent game studios, including Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Inxile, Compulsion and Playground.

One of the major reasons Sony has been dominating the market with the PS4 is the exhaustive list of exclusive titles, with the likes of God of War and Spider-Man offering amazing experiences that simply can’t be played on Xbox One.

Clearly Microsoft is currently looking to launch a counter-offensive as the Console Wars enter the fifth generation.

Hopefully, gamers on both platforms could win either way, providing the time between big game launches is reduced and the pricing of each game doesn’t rise to ridiculous amounts.

Scott Snowden is MyM’s US Editor. Follow him on Twitter.

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