Sony has postponed this week’s planned PS5 showcase event due to the ongoing civil unrest over police brutality in the United States.
The Future of Gaming event would have provided our first look at PS5 games and had been scheduled for June 4.
However, Sony says now is not the “right time for a celebration” of the forthcoming next-generation of PlayStation consoles. In a Twitter message, the company says it wants “more important voices to be heard.” It has not scheduled a new date for the event.
The company wrote: “We have decided to postpone the PlayStation 5 event scheduled for June 4. While we understand gamers worldwide are excited to see PS5 games, we do not feel the right now is a time for celebration and for now we want to stand back and allow more important voices to be heard.”
Related: Sony PS5 – All the latest news
Sony had planned for the live stream to take place on June 4, at 9pm UK time. It was to provide our first look at the new games for the PS5 console, which will launch during the holiday season in 2020. We were expecting Sony to showcase new first and third-party titles for the next-gen console.
PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan recently said of the event: “We just have to come up with ways to communicate what we’re doing, and try and engender the same level of adrenaline, excitement, buzz that we get with thousands of people in an auditorium in Los Angeles. And do that somehow remotely.”
Ryan goes on to confirm that “this is part of our series of PS5 updates and, rest assured, after next week’s showcase, we will still have much to share with you.” So, more events will likely take place in the run up to release.
In postponing the event, Sony is referring to the large scale protests following the death of George Floyd, an African American man, while being detained by police in the US city of Minneapolis. Large scale protests in the city stretched to other major population centres nationwide like Atlanta, Chicago Los Angeles, New York and Miami.
Sony’s action follows Google, which has also cancelled an event to launch the Android 11 public beta for the same reason.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
