Sony CEO John Kodera maintains that we won’t be seeing the PlayStation 5 until 2021, but industry experts believe that a secret launch plan could see the console reach our homes a lot earlier.

Tech news site T3 says that Sony is looking to get in ahead of the Xbox Two, codenamed ‘Xbox Scarlett’, by releasing the PS5 as soon as Christmas 2019.

The theory was first posited by Michael Pachter, the world’s foremost gaming analyst, who has a great track record of predicting industry movements. Rumours suggest that PS5 development kits have been doing the rounds for months now.

And now respected gaming industry analyst Hideki Yasuda, who works for the Osaka-based firm Ace Economic Research Institute, has backed up the claim that Sony is planning a sneak attack on its competition.

In a recent report, Yasuda said he believes that, "the introduction of the PS5 will be at the end of 2019".

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Which likely points to a November release date, just in time for the holiday season. It would also give Sony a year’s head-start on Microsoft – that is, if we don’t see a surprise early release for the Xbox, too.

The report also goes into detail on the upcoming console’s hardware, saying:

"The company's game machine is a high-performance machine that utilises high-end computer graphics… including the installation of a large number of MLCC [components]."

Back in May, Kadera stated that Sony needed to “depart from the traditional way of looking at the console life cycle, and that it needed to “crouch down” for a while in order to “jump higher in the future.” It’s looking far more likely that they’ll pounce.

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