PS5 Xbox Series X Specs Power

Much has already been said about how Sony's custom, super fast SSD could be a real game changer, with developers in particular expressing real excitement over the PlayStation 5 hardware. But with Mark Cerny's dry deep dive presentation, it's clear that Sony made a mistake -- at least from a marketing perspective. And interestingly, it's not just fans like ourselves that have expressed concern over this.

On the latest episode of the Kotaku Splitscreen podcast, ever-reliable industry source and Kotaku news editor Jason Schreier shares what he's heard from various people in the know. The quotes provide some interesting insight into what developers are thinking with regards to the PS5 and the aforementioned deep dive video.

The overarching theme here is that these devs sound seriously impressed with Sony's next-gen system, but the messaging is disappointingly stunted right now. Schreier begins: "So what I'm hearing from the people who are actually working on these [next-gen consoles] is that the Xbox Series X is not significantly more powerful than the PS5, despite this teraflops number. Teraflops might be a useful measure of comparison in some ways, but ultimately it's a theoretical max speed."

"The stuff I'm hearing from developers is very different from what I'm seeing in Sony's marketing strategy," Schreier adds.

"I'm getting texts and DMs from developers being like, this is such a shame, the PS5 is so superior in all these other ways that they're not actually able to message right now, or can't talk about right now. I heard from at least three different people, since the Cerny thing, that the PS5 is actually the superior piece of hardware in a lot of different ways despite what we're seeing in these spec sheets."

As Schreier goes on to say, there's still a lot of time for Sony to rework and correct its messaging. We're still around eight months from the PS5's launch -- unless it gets delayed -- and there's obviously a lot more ground to cover in terms of games, price, design, controllers... It's not like the PlayStation maker has nothing more to say.

In any case, it'll be fascinating to see what Sony has planned, especially when the actual hardware appears to have people within the industry so excited. Hopefully we hear more soon.

[source podcasts.google.com]