What 50,000 PlayStation 5 Emojis Tell Us About the Next-Gen Console War

• Sony’s PS5 reveal event is scheduled to take place tomorrow at 1 PM (PDT).
• To celebrate, Twitter added a new emoji featuring the DualSense controller.
• There is now an insane amount of hype riding on tomorrow’s event.

The PlayStation 5 reveal is almost upon us. Within the next 24 hours, we should be getting our real first good look at Sony’s next-gen machine. To celebrate, Twitter has added a new emoji to the service.

The PlayStation 5 Emoji Hype Is Real

If you use the #PS5  or #PlayStation5  hashtags, you get a little rendering of the new DualSense controller.

Obviously, with the “Future of Gaming” event so close, people are going mad about the Sony machine – often at Xbox’s expense.

With this new emoji, the real winners are going to be Sony.

There have already been over 50,000 tweets using the new PS5 emoji. Clearly, people are starting to get really excited about the new console. It’s not hard to see why either.

We’ve been starved of official PS5 news over the past few months. Tomorrow’s reveal has a lot of expectations riding on it.

Sony’s strategy of keeping us all in the dark has steadily raised the hype to a fever pitch. This new emoji seems to really be capitalizing on that strategy.

Hype Isn’t Enough Anymore

All of this hype is like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if the PS5 reveal goes well tomorrow, people will be doing a whole bunch of free marketing all over social media.

But there’s another way for this to go. This event has been pushed as a game showcase, so there’s a very real chance the presentation won’t be what people are expecting.

After all, the last time that Sony held a PlayStation 5 event, the response wasn’t exactly the best they could have hoped for.

If tomorrow disappoints enough people, then mass frustration with Sony could boil over. Their plan to use the “less is more” tactic of marketing might work to a point, but it’s a card you can only play for so long.

At this stage, the success of the PS5’s final marketing push may hinge on tomorrow’s event. The Twitter emojis spamming our feeds more than prove that Sony has the gaming community’s attention. But if they don’t deliver on months of hype, that’s only going to create more PR carnage when it all blows up in their face.

About the Author

William Worrall

William Worrall is a professional writer based out of the UK who has been writing about video and tabletop games for over a decade and has covered industry events such as EGX and UKGE. Contact him at [email protected], see his LinkedIn profile here.

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