Earlier this month, Sony caught gamers by surprise by releasing some of the specs for the upcoming PlayStation 5, including some of the console’s previously rumored backward compatibility details. While appreciated, the timing of the released spec list was certainly suspect. Now, it has been revealed why Sony chose to release the first batch of details early on, and it apparently has to do with the development kits sent out to third-party developers.

Journalist Jason Schreier recently took to Twitter to reveal that the reason why Sony released the first batch of PlayStation 5 specs so early was to avoid leaks. Sony is apparently sending out PS5 dev kits to third party development teams, and the company was reportedly concerned that the upcoming console’s specs would leak from one of said studios. As such, in order to “beat everyone to it,” Sony went ahead and released the details on its own.

As I said on today’s Kotaku Splitscreen – if you’re wondering why Sony randomly dropped PS5 news last week, one reason is that (I hear) a bunch of third-party studios got/are getting dev kits this month. Sony knew info would start leaking now. So they beat everyone to it

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) April 25, 2019

The early reveal works for Sony in a few different ways. This was obviously done to avoid leaks, though the spec list was also revealed prior to E3 2019, so in a sense Sony got a leg up on the competition despite not having an actual presence at the event. As such, any reveals done by Microsoft or Nintendo will still have to contend with Sony and the PS5, despite the former not actually being there. Given that the cat’s basically out of the bag at this point, it shouldn’t take Sony too much longer to do an official reveal.

So, thoughts on Sony’s reasoning behind the early PS5 details? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to Don’t Feed the Gamers for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow DFTG on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!