With the Sony PlayStation 4.5 set to be rolled out towards the end of this year, the release date of the PS5 may not come anytime soon.

This is not to dampen the spirits of those who are looking forward to getting their hands on the latest iteration of Sony's highly-popular gaming console.

However, when Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony's Worldwide Studios, was asked about the PS5 by developer Lorne Lanning, he responded by saying that the roll out of the PS5 should not be a question of "when" but rather "if," according to Tech Radar.

Sony's decision to push back the release date of the PS5 may lie in the fact that the PS4 has already sold 35 million units across the globe, and is showing no sign of slowing down.

Since its launch two years ago, Sony has done a great job of enhancing the features of the PS4, which now includes PlayStation Now, pre-loading games, YouTube streaming and PlayStation TV, to name a few.

Moreover, the Japanese company likes to keep the status quo, or at least, to wait until the hardware of its gaming consoles have already reached their full cycle - six years.

With the introduction of PlayStation Now and streaming capabilities into the PS4, there have been suggestions to scrap the console's hard drive, and consequently, do away with the physical copies of the game.

Nevertheless, Ben Wilson, former editor of Official PlayStation Magazine believes that gamers have a personal attachment to their CDs, and would unlikely give them up when the release date of the PS5 comes.

"There will always be those who prefer special editions and sexy packaging to invisible downloads, and it's those guys and girls who'll ensure disc drives live on within gaming in some form," Wilson said.

In the meantime, gaming site PS5PlayStation5 hinted that the PS5 might be released by November 2020.

The tech site pointed out that the PS2 came 5 years 3 months after the PS1, the PS3 arrived 6 years 8 months after the PS2, and the PS4 was launched 7 years and 5 days after the PS3.

There are however speculations that Sony's next-gen console might arrive sooner than expected.

According to Yoshida, AMD is reportedly working on the PS5's latest chipsets, which could mean that Sony's development team are already working on the console's design.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding the release date of the PS5, it is expected to be a groundbreaking event for the gaming world.