PS5 release may be staggered globally and start with North America

PS5 may come to North America before other regions as part of a staggered global launch, according to two updated product pages. 

This has been speculated since the release of a Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War trailer uploaded to the official PlayStation Youtube channel earlier this week. The trailer broke down the various digital editions for the game, and as Twitter user Riaan van Wyk noted at the time, it said that the PS5 version of the game would come to the US and Canada in holiday 2020, and to the "rest of the world" in late 2020. 

The original version of the trailer has been set to private, and the reuploaded version has removed this messaging. However, the Black Ops Cold War website still says that "the PlayStation 5 version of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is scheduled for release Holiday 2020 in the US and Canada, and in late 2020 for the rest of the world."

More recently, the release window on the UK version of Sony's PS5 product page was changed from holiday 2020 to late 2020. A recent entry on the Wayback Machine confirms that the UK page showed a holiday 2020 launch as recently as a few weeks ago, and the US page still says holiday 2020. This lines up with the delays outlined in the now-pulled Black Ops Cold War trailer, which certainly raises an eyebrow. The staggered release of Black Ops Cold War could be chalked up to the game itself, but with Sony's pages now mirroring this timeline, it's looking more and more likely that the PS5 will come to North America before other regions. How much sooner, we can't be sure, but likely not more than a few weeks.

In a May interview with GamesIndustry, Sony CEO Jim Ryan said that, "We are going to launch this holiday and we're going to launch globally." Last month, Eric Lempel, senior vice president and global marketing head at Sony, affirmed that "we will launch this year - that will happen." These statements suggest that, even if the PS5 release is somewhat staggered, the console will be available in all regions before the end of the year. This wouldn't be a huge surprise, seeing as how the PS4 came to the PAL regions two weeks after it arrived in North America, but Japan only got it several months later. Here's hoping the PS5 global release is a bit tighter. 

We've reached out to Sony for more information and will update this story if we hear back. 

Ubisoft recently posted and swiftly removed a claim that PS5 backwards compatibility will not support PS3, PS2, and PS1 games.