It’s hard to believe, but the PlayStation 4 is already in its fifth year on the market. In that time, Sony’s fourth home console has become one of the best-selling gaming platforms in history and built up an impressive library of games, quite a few of which can only be played exclusively on it. In 2016, Sony released the PS4 Pro — a hardware revision that boasted an upgraded CPU and GPU in order to support 4K gameplay, but a console that nevertheless more of a half-step upgrade rather than a new standard.
We know that Sony is hard at work on the next generation of PlayStation hardware (which we can safely assume will be called the PlayStation 5), but it’s unclear how long we’ll have to wait to see it on store shelves. Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter predicts that we’ll see the PS5 sometime in 2019, though others believe it could come as early as late 2018.
Whenever it does come out, it’s doubtful that Sony will release the PS5 anytime soon given how successful the PS4 has been (and continues to be). However, the console also isn’t far enough away that we can’t start wondering what sort of features it will bring to the table, so here are the 12 things I think Sony needs to include with the PlayStation 5.
12. Let Us Change Our PSN Names
More casual PlayStation owners may be surprised to see this point brought up here, but anyone who’s owned a PlayStation console since the early days of PlayStation Network knows how frustrating it is that Sony still hasn’t implemented a way for users to change their PSN name. What’s the big deal, right? If you don’t like your name, just make a new profile! Well, more than a decade into the PlayStation Network’s lifespan, many users have invested thousands of dollars into the Sony ecosystem through various games and other purchases, so it’s not exactly feasible to just throw that all away and start over from scratch.
Part of the blame can be placed on the user of course, as we all should have put more thought into our names when we first created our PSN accounts. But really, this is Sony’s fault, as the company not only gave no clear indication that we’d be stuck with whatever dumb name we chose with no possible way of changing it, but also didn’t have the foresight to design a network capable of changing usernames without much difficulty. Microsoft has allowed users to change their Xbox Live gamertags since the Xbox 360 days (for a small fee), and the inability to do so on PlayStation only grows more absurd with each passing year. Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of stating the obvious: Sony needs to figure out how to make this right on the PS5, plain and simple.
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