Last night’s PS5 reveal stream was as big a deal as it gets in gaming. Setting the tone of expectation for the immediate and long-term future of videogames, the unveiling of any new PlayStation has been a weighty industry event for the last two decades.

Arguably the biggest name in games, (and certainly the market leader throughout the entirety of this current hardware generation), Sony’s influential innovations and sheer, dominant momentum over the course of the PS4’s life have made the PlayStation 5 a matter of huge expectation. So what did we think?

Well first there’s the physical box itself. Its aesthetic, it’s fair to say, is ‘unexpected’. Dropping the understated, matt-black angles of Sony’s current machine, the PlayStation 5 is an altogether more stylised, curved, abstractly designed piece, its black-and-white colouring making it an even more radical departure from Sony’s traditional, one-colour designs up until this point.

Given that Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox Series X has doubled down on the Xbox One’s solid, utilitarian look with a boxy, square tower design (a far cry from the sleek, white curves of the earlier Xbox 360), it’s fair to say that the two companies have now near-enough traded places in their visual design philosophy. Whether it’s also fair to agree with gaming Twitter’s blunt appraisal of the PS5 resembling a WiFi router is a matter for you to decide.

As for the games, though? The revealed line-up so far - covering the PlayStation 5’s still-projected Holiday 2020 launch window and beyond - is a solid and convincing lot, albeit perhaps safe and typically Sony. This is a platform holder with a clear and assured sense of its brand and audience, and the roster of games shown off this week seemed laser-targeted to compound that.

Leading with Forbidden West, a sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn and an expanded, upgraded reimagining of Marvel’s Spider-Man, Sony’s PS5 initial line-up was clearly eager to trade on the biggest AAA hits of the PS4’s more recent life, rather than delve back further for the major reveals. Big, cinematic, open-world follow-ups to big, cinematic, open-world fan-favourites, still fresh in the memory, was a smart play.

Further down the list, long-serving, beloved franchises and niche-pleasing treatments scored the PS5 some hardcore kudos, with Oddworld and Ratchet & Clank getting new and refreshed entries, and the cultishly adored, now-legendary Demon’s Souls (forerunner to Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro) getting a stunning-looking remaster by masters of the art, Bluepoint Games.

Additionally, the heft of third-party support is strong already, with the PS5 having apparently snagged exclusivity for two of Bethesda Softworks’ biggest reveals from E3 2019, Deathloop and GhostWire: Tokyo. The latest new IP from Dishonored studio Arkane Lyon and Evil Within creators Tango Gameworks respectively, both games already look to build on their studios’ intelligent, experimental treatment of big-budget action gaming, with an enthralling level of audio-visual style.

Speaking of the more idiosyncratically striking, the PlayStation 5’s early line-up is filled out with a great many games from smaller but well-respected studios feeding a healthy supply of new ideas into the artier end of Sony’s typically indie-friendly ecosystem.

Between the heartfelt narrative of teen-dinosaur drama Goodbye Volcano High, the time-looping, existential action-horror of Housemarque’s Returnal, and the galaxy-spanning, civilisation-saving, space exploration of poetic sci-fi game Jett: The Far Shore (not to mention the deliciously weird, reality-bending futuristic dystopia of Pragmata from Capcom, who also brought major AAA support with the reveal of Resident Evil VIII), Sony was very careful to emphasise that PlayStation is very much going to remain the home of experimentation, artistry, expression, and innovation in the videogames space.

Whether the proliferation of games focused around escaping from timeloops, dying planets, saving fallen civilisations, and post-apocalyptic, potentially simulated realities speaks to wider cultural concerns is, again, a question for you. But overall, the PlayStation 5 currently looks convincing indeed. Very much a case of Sony picking up where this generation is set to leave off, and running with a bolder, better version of what works.

Above: Two PlayStation 5’s? Read on for the difference, and why it might be very important. — Above: *Two* PlayStation 5’s? Read on for the difference, and why it might be very important.

It is though, very interesting - and potentially highly important - to note that the PS5 comes in two hardware formats, standard, and the Digital Edition. The latter is a launch-day console without a disc-drive, something unheard-of up until now, and potentially a very strong sign that this incumbent generation might finally be the last one to see the videogames industry support physical media. That advent has been rumoured for well over a decade at this point, but the release of the two PS5s side-by-side certainly gives the impression that Sony this might well see this as a transitional era.

However next-gen turns out, this isn’t the last you’ll hear of it on the Fourth Floor blog. Fully embedded in the games industry, both professionally and culturally, we’ll be following every single step along the path to the next hardware generation’s launch (and beyond). In fact we already have our data team studying the unfurling story in terms of performance, sentiment, and the overall shape of conversation, ready to bring you some major insights and ongoing analysis over the coming weeks and months. All that will appear right here, as it’s ready, so keep an eye on Fourth Floor, and we’ll keep you in the (non-temporal) loop.