About the only concrete detail we got about the PlayStation 4 aside from specs and games was a general release window. Sony confirmed in a split second at the end of its event Wednesday that their PS4 would indeed be launching this holiday season.
Almost everyone is expecting a November launch to follow suit with every home console of the last decade. Sony’s confirmation of that timeframe leads us to believe that we’ll be expecting their console around that time, and we’ll even peg a date today: November 12, 2013.
If we’re right, you heard it here first. If not, well, we don’t care.
We think the console will launch on November 12th for a few reasons. First, the date is a highly marketable day for movies and video games because, not only does it fall on a Tuesday when most media is released, but its abbreviated form is 11 / 12 / 13.
A date with a mnemonic device like this also attracts Activision and is around the same time Call of Duty releases their latest yearly title. That would make Call of Duty a launch title for the PS4, something Sony probably wouldn’t shy away from, especially because Microsoft has a monopoly over the early-release of the franchise’s downloadable content.
Then again, nothing is stopping Microsoft from releasing their console on the same day. We saw that back in 2006 with the launch of the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii, which launched within two days of each other in North America.
Of course, we don’t know pricing at this time, and everyone can speculate $399 to $499, and those people will likely be right. What’s more intriguing to us is the date.
We don’t actually think we’ll get a date before August or September, in fact, as Sony probably won’t have a handle for production schedules until well after E3 has come and gone, making it impossible for them to announce a date in June. We could be wrong, but Nintendo had the same strategy last year when they announced the pricing and official launch date of their console a few months after the gaming expo.