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June 14, 2020

Sony Finally Reveals The PS5 Design And The Internet Goes Ballistic

While in the midst of a pandemic , any good news is very much welcomed, however I think we got a bit more than we bargained for when Sony decided to drop the designs of the 5th PlayStation console. The PS5 design which is to be released at the end of this year was revealed at the PlayStation5 Future of Gaming event on Thursday, June, 11, and gaming enthusiasts took to social media to share their thoughts.

The PS5 design was revealed on Thursday, 11 June at the Future of Gaming event. This release, which is set to be available towards the end of 2020, will be competing with the Xbox Series X which is also scheduled for release at the same time. The game will be competing with Xbox Series X which will also be released towards the end of this year. Fans had a lot to say about the PS5 design which included a white outer shell, black hardware, and blue lighting elements.

With such a big release comes very big conversations around specs, design, price, compatibility and competitor comparisons. The 4 p’s of marketing. Using Brandwatch’s consumer insights platform we delved a bit deeper into the conversation to understand what this looks like. Within the 1st week of release there were over 1 Million mentions of PS5. Most pressing question amongst gamers was the official release date, The Spiderman: Miles Morale game that is one of 15 games that come standard with the console.

The PS5 design gained over 1 Million total mentions gamers describing the console as a superior gaming console. With much praise on the envious design, came the difficult discussion of price. At what cost to which body part would this beautifully crafted piece of engineering come? According to social media the speculated retail price estimate would be around $500, R8715,18 to be exact. The CEO of Playstation has however contradicted these rumours by releasing a statement saying that they are focusing on value over price for this edition.

Either way South African gamers were quick to express their willingness to do almost anything to get their hands on this hot property. A female influencer took the lead by offering to buy any male the new PS5 console if they twerked for her. Stereotypical gender roles were quickly reversed as a male took her up on her challenge to secure himself a PS5.

xBox Tweet

There have also been speculations around the price of PS5 being $500, but Sony has not said anything about the pricing as the company CEO has emphasised it must ensure that they focus on getting the value equation right.

PS CEO Tumblr post

Only two versions of the game were revealed, the first being the edition with an optical drive and the other is a digital edition for game downloads only which might cost a little less than the other version.

With that being said, we looked at conversations that happened during the week of the release of the PS5 and we were able to get up to a million mentions around the PlayStaion5 conversation with over 740 thousand authors taking part. With Spiderman: Miles Morale as one of 15 games that comes with PS5, most people showed excitement around it than with other games.

PS5 Brandwatch summary

As we look at people’s feelings around the release, we also take at a look at emojis that were used to show expression when PS5 was mentioned. The emojis that stood out were the face with tears of joy emoji, the loudly crying face emoji and the smiling face with heart eyes emoji. Most emojis depicted positive emotions around the conversation.

Word cloud PS5

With Twitter being at the forefront of our data collection, people on the app had a lot to say about the release of the game and it is evident that #PS5 and #PlayStation5 were the most mentioned hashtags with people also ensuring they tag @playstation5 within their mentions.

PS5 Word cloud 2

All insights were collected through Brandwatch Consumer Research. The data used are from different content sources, but most of it is from Twitter. With all that’s been said, PS5 looks pretty cool and the reaction received was mostly amazing, though it was expected.