PlayStation 5 Will Use Less Power When Suspending Games

Good news, everyone! Sony dropped some news about its next-generation console. Bad news: it might not be the kind of information you were hoping for.

Sony announced on the PlayStation Blog yesterday that the company is taking part in what's called the "Playing for the Planet" alliance. As part of that initiative, Sony is working with the United Nations to assess where the PlayStation business lies with regard to lowering its carbon footprint, and that includes examining how the company's next console will perform in the area of power consumption.

While not calling it the PlayStation 5, Sony made reference to its "next generation PlayStation console" and the software suspend feature it'll apparently include. And it seems Sony believes it can reduce the power draw of its next machine while in suspend mode, helping to "save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes" if just one million players enable it.

This is actually great news. This is Sony being environmentally conscious, making a change where it can. No arguments there. The thing is, this just isn't the kind of thing that would make headlines for most other products, because most other products aren't shrouded in secrecy. When Apple pulls the curtain back on a new iPhone, it can sometimes take Tim Cook almost an hour to get to how eco-friendly the device is. And that's because those kinds of features aren't prioritized over things like processing power, photo quality, and battery life.

Long story short: you probably wouldn't be hearing about the PS5's low-power suspend mode if there were more specific specs floating around out there.

But perhaps those are coming soon. We didn't bring this latest mention of the next-gen PlayStation up; Sony did. So maybe the company is gearing up to talk more about the PlayStation 5 within the next few months. We've been told to not expect anything during the company's next State of Play, but after that... who knows.