Sony had considered showing the PlayStation 4 at yesterday"s event but decided not to.
At last night"s PlayStation 4 announcement, Sony didn"t actually show the PlayStation 4 console itself, but a company executive says there"s a reason for that.
According to separate comments made to Polygon and Kotaku, Sony wants to have something to reveal about the console at a later date. Because of that, the company decided to not show the console at yesterday"s event, though company executives said they could have.
Shuhei Yoshida, president of Worldwide Studios at Sony Computer Entertainment, told Polygon just that and added that the company is still trying to decide whether or not to show the physical console at this year"s E3 event in June.
"The console is just a box," he said. "The controller was very important to show because it has the share button, but the console is just a console."
Yoshida echoed that statement in some separate comments made to Kotaku, saying his company had originally planned on showing the console at the event but decided not to after discussions on what it was comfortable revealing. Instead, he said, the company felt like showing the controller was necessary because of the actual game demonstrations taking place at the event.
"And we were like, "Yeah, we have to show the controller," because it"s awkward not to show the controller when someone is doing a demo," he told the gaming site. "And also the feature that the DualShock 4 has, the share button, is a very key idea behind the design of the PS4. ... We really wanted to explain what we"ve done with the DualShock 4, but as far as the system itself we have to keep something new for later. Otherwise you"d get bored."
The PlayStation 4 is scheduled to launch this holiday season, although a specific date wasn"t revealed. Typically physical consoles are shown well in advance of their launch dates, meaning the console itself will almost surely be revealed months before it"s released to consumers.