Earlier this week, Dutch website LetsGoDigital released an article regarding an unknown patent submitted by Sony Interactive Entertainment. In the article were photos of the patent and quickly led to speculation that it was for the PS5 development kit. Yesterday, Matthew Stott, a senior artist at Codemasters confirmed it is a dev kit in a tweet saying "we have some in the office." Codemasters is the developer of the F1 series and upcoming racing game GRID. As of today, Stott has his account set to private.

This past April, lead system architect Mark Cerny spoke with Wired about the expectations and hardware of Sony's next-generation console. Cerny also confirmed that the console will include a solid-state drive and be backward compatible. Recently, there have been rumors of a "PlayStation Meeting" taking place in February. If the rumors are true this could be when Sony debuts the console and all its details.

It seems that Sony has a good vision of how they want the PS5 to perform. That being said, it isn't too surprising that developers already have dev kits. Assuming that it will launch by the end of 2020 like Project Scarlett, developers need the kits as soon as they can to get their games out once the system launches.

Sony isn't the only company gearing up for the next generation. At E3 this year, Microsoft officially announced Project Scarlett. There are few specifications regarding what will be under the hood, but it sounds like a worthy contender to the PlayStation 5 based on what Microsoft is striving for. It is exciting to see the next generation of consoles slowly come to light, but all we can do now is wait and see what each platform has to offer.