PlayStation fans have been given a boost ahead of the Christmas shopping season.
It was recently revealed that Sony was thinking of increasing the price of the PS4 in the US.
Sony admitted that the Trump administration’s plan to impose higher tariffs on goods from China would potentially lead to increased console prices.
Tariffs for Chinese-manufactured goods could be increased by an additional 15%, which would make it more expensive for Sony to export the PS4 to America.
Fortunately for Sony, however, the increased tariffs have been delayed to December 15 by the US government.
With console sales increasing during the holiday season, the delay in implementing the new tariffs is great news for Sony’s bottom line.
It’s also good news for customers, who won’t have to pay over the odds in the run up to Christmas.
Slightly harder to predict is what impact the increased tariffs will have on the PlayStation 5.
Sony’s new console is expected to launch during the 2020 holiday season.
Companies and consumers will be hoping the trade conflict will be over by then, because otherwise the PS5 could be quite expensive.
The high spec PlayStation console will support 8K resolution, ray-tracing and have much faster loading times.
The speedy (or non-existent) loading times are possible thanks to the specialised solid-state drive, which will make a huge difference to processing speeds.
In Spider-Man on a PS4 Pro, for example, it can take upwards of 15 seconds to fast travel from one location to another. The PS5, on the other hand, will be able to handle the same task in less than a second.
Worlds can also be rendered at far greater speeds, which should inject more pace into games.
One game that seems certain to take advantage of this extra processing power is Dying Light 2, which has been confirmed as a cross-gen release.
This means not only will it launch on PS4 and Xbox One in 2020, but it will also come to the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett.