According to a tipster that talked to the guys from Kotaku, the successor of the Playstation 3 is code-named “Orbis” and it is scheduled to hit the shelves in time for holiday next year. Probably the most important news regarding Sony’s next-gen console is that it will have an anti-used-game system and also it won’t offer backward compatibility.
The new games which will be developed for the Orbis are going to be available through Blu-ray discs or as a PSN download, and the bad news is that these games are going to be locked to just one PSN account. You are probably now thinking that the solution to this is not going online, but the thing is that users will be forced to be connected to the Playstation Network in order to boot the games.
Playstation Orbis
The same source reports that even though gamers will have the possibility to trade the games for the new Playstation, the buyer of the game is going to be restricted to just a trial mode and for unlocking the full title they will have no other way but to pay some sort of fee.
Kotaku mentioned that the Japanese company Sony doesn’t want to implement backwards compatibility in the successor of the PS3, which is going to be a different approach taking into consideration that the PS2, PS3 and the recently introduced Vita offer some sort of support for older games.
The tipster said that the next-gen PS is going to arrive on the market in holiday 2013, adding that Sony has already started sending Orbis dev kits to “select developers”. “Finalized beta units” are set to arrive at developers towards the end of the year.
What will be under the hood of the new Playstation? The website reports that Orbis will be powered by an AMD x64 processor and an AMD Southern Islands GPU. The graphics processor will be fully capable of handling Orbis games at a maximum resolution of 4,096 x 2,160 pixels as well as 3D games at 1080p. This isn’t the first time since we’ve heard rumors that Sony’s new console is going to be powered by Advanced Micro Devices.
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