Late last year, Sony president and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida confirmed that a next-generation PlayStation was in development, and Mark Cerny, chief architect of the upcoming console, has been hard at work on the PS5 ever since.
Based on previous console launches, it'd be safe to assume that a standard PS5 machine will get released first, followed by a slimmed-down model shortly after and a beefed-up 'pro' version a few years later.
However, a new rumor has cropped up suggesting that Sony will cut to the chase and launch the PlayStation 5 Pro at the same time as its base-model PS5.
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As spotted by Wccftech, noted Japanese games journalist Zenji Nishikawa made the claim in a new video on his YouTube channel, and while that kind of thing normally wouldn't be considered a rock-solid lead, Nishikawa has proven accurate in the past with his predictions of the PS4 Pro and Switch Lite.
According to Nishikawa, the PS5 Pro will cost around $100-$150 more than the basic PS5 console. The report states that Sony is taking this approach because it has "acknowledged the interest in a high-end model and wants to give players what they want right from the beginning of the generation."
Of course, it's hard to imagine what a 'Pro' version of the PlayStation 5 might look like, given that the base model's confirmed specs already indicate that it'll be a beast – at the PS5's announcement, Cerny revealed that it'll boast 8K TV support, an 8-core AMD chipset based on third generation Ryzen architecture, a GPU based on the Radeon Navi family, ray-tracing capability, an SSD storage system and backwards compatibility with PS4 games and PSVR hardware.
The PlayStation 5 is expected to launch sometime in 2020-2021.
