Following claims that GTA 6 will release in 2022 and be set in Vice City, another piece of news has arrived that's also squarely in the 'rumor' category. According to industry insider Marcus Sellars, development kits for the PlayStation 5 were sent to third-party developers earlier this year.

November 2018 will mark five years since the PlayStation 4 launched, and although the PS4 Pro mid-generation refresh hasn't even reached its second anniversary, talk has turned to the next-generation of Sony's console: the PlayStation 5.

Sellars hasn't cited any sources for his claims, so it's best to take them with a pinch of salt, but some of his previous statements have turned out to be right. He correctly revealed the date of today's Nintendo Direct before it was officially announced and leaked the news that Black Ops 4 is this year's entry in the Call of Duty franchise. It appears he was also right about Diablo 3 coming to the Nintendo Switch.

If this rumor is true, it doesn't mean that the PlayStation 5 is arriving this year. These kits usually consist of specialist hardware designed to replicate the specs of the final product, or they could be prototypes. They often look very different from the finished console and are there to help designers with early game development and testing on the platform.

This could all just be hokum of course, but several analysts have already said they expect to see the PlayStation 5 in either late 2019 or early 2020. And a recently granted Sony patent suggested it was working on backward compatibility for a new system, so the Japanese firm might already be ensuring that PS4 games work on its new console.

It'll certainly be interesting to see how powerful the PlayStation 5 is compared to the Pro, and whether it offers more than just incremental improvements, which some expect.