In early July there was a rumour regarding PlayStation 4 production by a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer. The story suggested that Sony were already developing the PlayStation 4 and wanted to have 20 million units ready for the end of 2012. So what’s happened to the PSthree?

So far, Sony has always revised their home consoles towards the end of a console’s life-cycle, so that it is significantly smaller, and cheaper. Whilst some may argue that the current PlayStation 3 is already a PS3 Slim, what they may not know is that Sony asked media outlets specifically not to refer to it as a “PS3 Slim,” but rather the “new PS3.” So a PSthree is definitely still on the cards.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 has always been the most expensive of the home consoles on the market, yet has still been able to compete with the Xbox 360 and Wii to an extent. However, it is trailing on sales in North America, where it seems that price is a major issue. It’s been two years since the PS3 was first redesigned, and it had a great effect on sales, even though this was most likely a reactionary step from Sony due to slow sales. A further reduction in size will mean cheaper production costs, which would mean a cheaper console for consumers, and possibly a sub-$200 system, the console price “sweet-spot” as Microsoft said.

GamesCom was the stage for Sony’s PS3 redesign announcement the first time, who’s to say it won’t happen again. The event takes place between 17th to 21st August in 2011, and we’re hoping to be surprised by some PSthree news.

The image above is a render kindly provided by Gaf (you can check out his blog here), he’s told me that he may post some earlier images of his concept design there. This concept is supposed to be about the same size as a PSTwo, but with a slide-in disc tray, rather than an flip-top. It seems more likely this way because flip-top usually makes playing copies of games slightly easier to play.