Sony says ‘wait for PS5 sales’ before comparing it to Microsoft’s Xbox marketing

Sony says PlayStation 5 sales will prove whether its quiet promotion of its next-gen console will beat rival Microsoft. Sony has remained relatively quiet about its PlayStation 5 plans, revealing some specs, a logo, and a controller but no full console reveal or potential games just yet.

In an investor call earlier today, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki fielded a question from an analyst around the lack of PS5 promotion versus the Xbox Series X and whether the company is failing to keep up with Microsoft’s push.

Sony might not have revealed full details just yet, but it’s clearly already confident about its next-gen plans. “We consider things strategically but doing our best,” said Totoki, reports Bloomberg’s Takashi Mochizuki. “As for pass or fail, I would wait for PS5 sales to make that judgement.”

That’s quite the quote from Totoki, just as Sony reveals the PS4 has now topped 110 million units sold worldwide. Microsoft hasn’t revealed overall Xbox One sales, but some analysts believe the company has sold around 50 million units. Sony still expects to ship its new PS5 console in the holiday season later this year and doesn’t anticipate “major problems” for its first-party games owing to the ongoing pandemic.

Sony revealed its new DualSense controller for the PlayStation 5 last month, just weeks after confirming the hardware specs for the PS5. Sony’s next-gen console will ship with 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 (variable frequency).

Sony has focused a lot of its effort on the custom storage solution for the PS5. The company has created an impressive proprietary SSD solution that provides 825GB of storage and 5.5GB/s of performance. The Xbox Series X includes a custom 1TB NVME SSD, but its raw throughput is less than half at 2.4GB/s. Microsoft is instead promising to deliver sustained performance at 12 teraflops of power.

We’re still waiting on Sony to show what the PS5 actually looks like and confirm its plans for games for the console. That’s bound to happen very soon, and the competition between the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will shift toward the available games and pricing. Sony took an early lead in PS4 sales, thanks to being priced $100 less than the Xbox One. Microsoft has committed to not making that mistake again with the Xbox Series X, but neither company has discussed pricing just yet.