Seems as though the video game industry could use a good plumber(we’re looking at you Mario!!!) as yet another big reveal appears to have leaked in advance of the Playstation Meeting scheduled for September 7th. Earlier this month Sony sent out invitations to the media for a special event where they intend to talk about the PlayStation 4 business. It has been speculated Sony is planning to show off their upgraded Playstation 4 console codenamed Neo, games running on Neo, and how it will work with Playstation VR. Apparently there’s more.
Starting over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran a story revealing that Sony intended to show off a new Playstation 4 Slim model at next months Playstation Meeting. According to WSJ, “Sony has cut production of PlayStation 4 to adjust inventory.” Meanwhile Famitsu indicates that Playstation 4 sales have been weaker in Japan than they have been in the United States and showed that sales in Japan have been declining slightly in recent weeks. Sony officially confirmed the existence of Neo the Friday prior to E3 this year, but not the Slim, or possible release window.
Continuing this trend of gaming secrets leaking early, the first Playstation 4 Slim has already appeared in the wild. While browsing a website called Gumtree(basically the UK version of Craigslist) a Twitter user by the name shortman82 found several ads selling the Playstation 4 Slim. It wasn’t long after this that the news had spread to NeoGAF complete with comparison photos and everyone plus their sister claiming it was fake. This would not be the case, as Richard Leadbetter from Digital Foundry visited one of the people claiming to have bought a Playstation 4 Slim off of Gumtree. As you can see in the video below, Leadbetter confirmed in a video that was previously on YouTube that the console is in fact real. The video has since been taken down by Eurogamer based on advice from their legal team.
While this development was a bit unexpected, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to many. At E3 in June Microsoft had a similar announcement showcasing two separate consoles, one slim and one upgraded ‘beast’ of a machine. Considering how competitive the two console manufacturers have been in the past three generations it’s no surprise that the two of them are on incredibly similar paths. One notable difference between the two strategies is that, as of right now, it would appear the Playstation 4 Slim is nothing more than a slimmed down Playstation 4. While the Xbox One S is also a slimmed down Xbox One, it is also an upgraded machine capable of playing UHD 4k Blu-ray discs, 4k streaming, and outputting HDR10 visuals. None of these upgrades appear to be included with the Playstation 4 slim. It will be interesting to see which of the two slimmed down machines will fare better going forward if this is true.