Andrew House gives the first PlayStation 4 to Joey Chiu, after he forks over $400.
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The DeanBeat: The next-generation console war starts out with small gestures

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Imagine my voice sounds like a horse-racing announcer…. And they’re off! Sony is winning the next-generation console wars. Well, only because it started selling PlayStation 4 machines last night, while Microsoft won’t start selling the Xbox One until a week from now.

Still, it’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement. Sony put on a reasonably good show in New York at the Standard High Line Hotel, where the entire place — even the showers in the rooms — was decked out in PlayStation branded regalia. More than 500 gamers showed up to get their preordered PS 4s and they were treated to free food, T-shirts, and lots of hands-on gameplay with demo systems.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.