This week on Crave, possible bad news for San Francisco football ns, courtesy of the game Madden. Plus, J.J. Abrams the musical?

An invitation sent to the press today teases what looks to be a major announcement for the company; could it be the debut of the PlayStation 4? One report says yes.

Update, 8:15 p.m. PT:The Wall Street Journal cited people miliar with the matter in reporting this evening that Sony will indeed unveil the PS4 on February 20 and that the device will go on sale later this year. The Journals sources also said Sony will add more social gaming features to the new PlayStation and will focus not on juicing up the gadgets hardware but on how players interact with the device. Sony had thought about dumping the PlayStations optical disk drive in vor of gamers download new games over the Internet, the Journal reported, but its decided against that because of concerns over download times. Finally, the Journal said Sony will likely go with chips from AMD, rather than the Sony-IBM-Toshiba-developed Cell chip thats in the PS3, a move that could cause compatibility issues with current games and would end Sonys partnership with graphics-chip maker Nvidia.

Attached to the invitation is a short teaser video that consists only of a trippy flythrough of the iconic PlayStation shapes, not offering much transparency as to the true purpose of the event. In any case,new york asian escort it has certainly reignited the buzz surrounding next-gen hardware and added strength to rumors that Sony and Microsofts new consoles may debut before their traditional E3 unveiling. (A new report, too, lends even more heft to the rumors; see the update note at the eGadgets Sony teases big NYC event for Feb 20 PS4 debutnd of this story.)

Time to dust off that hype machine. The next generation of video game consoles may debut as early as February 20. Thats the date Sony has set aside for an event in New York City, leading some to believe this could be the first-ever announcement of the PlayStation 4, the inevitable successor to the companys current PlayStation 3 game system.

CNET will be on-hand to cover the event in full, Gadgets so be sure to keep it here for the latest.

Jeff BakalarJeff has been at CNET for more than five years covering games, tech, and pop culture. When hes not playing ice hockey, you can catch him live every day as the host of CNETs inmous daily show, The 404 and every Thursday in CNETs first-ever tech comic, Low Latency.