LowDefAl

@evasdf This was a Sony Group project not a PlayStation project. I doubt PlayStation were much involved directly compared to the audio, display and camera guys for example.

Sony Mobility were the division heading this with Honda

@Amnesiac Exactly there is a combination of issues. The orange one effectively destroying the non-Tesla EV market in the US after bribing the pro oil lobby to fund his campaign in exchange for his anti environment policies (not that he needed it as he would have done so anyway) coupled with a slower than ideal take up globally and all the other various world issues affecting sales is bad enough.

Apparently the car is looking outdated compared to the competition is another factor alongside Honda’s epic fail with their F1 engine and they are going to be changing focus.

I don’t have any personal stake in wether this game succeeds or doesn’t (if you actively want a game to fail you need to see a psychiatrist or just get off the internet for a while and go outside) but I’m not sure I would put much faith in analysts or “my uncle who works for bungie” type evidence.

That said, it’s hardly encouraging and it didn’t exactly shoot up sonys own charts

@Mes_Urson Sometimes games just get stuck in a place where they don’t work out. For all the ones you hear about there are many, many more that you haven’t.

This isn’t new and has been the case since the 80s. You just get more leaks and announcements these days. It was actually Mark Cerny’s “method” that popularised quick prototyping to see if a game is actually a fun concept Before you enter full
Production to mitigate that risk. The first Horizon is a good example of this being of benefit - they made a bunch of basic prototypes while developing Killzone Shadow Fall before green lighting the full game

Sometimes it’s cheaper to cut your loses than fix the issue.

@Haruki_NLI we have at least seen Fairgame, but no I wouldn’t be surprised if they never released it.

@wildcat_kickz Jason Blundell certainly has to be shown the door after two botched studios with his name on them.

In this case I’m going to say that the same studio runner has now killed two studios for Sony without having anything to show so I’ll let Hulst of this one.

But only this one.

@Korgon all the legal costs over their battles with Apple and Google probably haven't helped and its generally accepted that Epic Game Store is either a loss leader or makes little money.

@INeedGoodGraphics You are right, but given that ps5 is doing similar numbers to ps4 despite costing twice the price at this point it’s not like it’s stopping people from buying them.

Nintendo are also picking up the slack from Microsoft.

Obviously they would sell more at a lower price but the market hasn’t really declined in the way some people would suggest. As long as you have a console someone wants of course.

@ElkinFencer10 All of Epics resources are in Fortnite or the engine so I don’t see any change here. They will look to reshine their golden goose before doing anything actually interesting.

It’s the same reason they sold Gears of War to Microsoft

@ElkinFencer10 Epic have made it clear that UT is a dead franchise in their eyes and that’s why they are allowing fans to maintain the older games.

The only way we will see a new UT (unless we want a live service version which we don’t) is if someone licenses it.

@RyPal May I suggest you don't make assumptions about peoples employment status based on their being able to spot the tell tale signs of AI.

Once is bad enough but you keep repeating it and its not a good look.

@dskatter I'm aware of the potential. I'm also aware that many games have basically no difference. I also know that many games have their performance improved through patches even before it's removed and that developers may do further optimisations at the same time rather than just because they turned it off. I'm also aware some cracks "fix" the performance caused in other areas separately by applying community optimisations. Modders do that all the time even with non-denuvo games.

It's not a binary situation. Some games are bad if they have it or not. A lot of games run fine. Lets not pretend that Denuvo is killing performance in every game its in and that it isn't often bad optimisation.

And if it's that big an issue, wait for the Denuvo to be removed a few months later and buy it cheaper. Everyone wins.

@dskatter Its a weird world we live in when people complain that a developer wants to prevent their game being pirated on the first day.

Of all the complaints aimed at Pearl Abyss, it ranks pretty low.

@Oxy It was never a size issue, and I doubt it’s because of spoilers when we know enough now to know the game was clearly struggling to make its release date. Otherwise they would have had a release build on console ready more than two weeks before launch instead of giving the one privileged outlet a non final build to look at.

@Spedfrom For the record I don’t believe the game was actually finished at that point. Because why would you go to all that effort instead of just giving them the release build. Really the game needed another month but I’m not sure they recognised this early enough.

I suspect this is also why disc copies require an update to play.

Which is all a separate issue, but this is their first time doing a single player game so I would argue a lack of experience.

@CallMeDuraSouka You think that won't happen regardless?

That’ll make it (somewhat) easier to browse the sales.

@datamonkey It’s not a question of who was in charge but changes in the industry in that time. People need to stop pretending that 2005 should dictate 2026. I’m not saying Hulst is perfect, far from it but Shuhei Yoshida and Hulst were operating in very different environments.

I’m all for Sony spreading their efforts into all sizes and shapes of games but the comparisons overlook wider changes to who is playing, what they are playing and how they are playing it.

@Ragnarok7326 Motion smoothing is an entirely different thing. And universally awful.

@Fluberuper You’ll find mixed opinions. I used OG frame gen for Indy because I was using Path tracing. I had no issues but I’m not sure it’s good for faster games. I also probably didn’t need to use it, I was just playing with it.

It’s still mildly controversial I think but it’s hard to argue with the option. The 4x is probably not a great idea however

@Haruki_NLI Not sure MH is a good example, the game had notorious performance issues and presumably that was a bodge “fix”

@DualWielding Almost certainly part of rdna5 and therefore on the table

@rjejr

Square released FF7, FF8 and FF9 in 3 consecutive years, and now it's taking them at least 6 years to re-release just FF7. At what point is it enough?

The problem with your comparison is that VII was in development for 3 years first and that those 3 games were made using 2 separate teams. And FF7R is three separate 30-50hr games so “just ff7” is rather misleading.

Taking this into account along with the substantial changes in gaming technology and scope between then And now I’m not sure this comparison holds water.

(9, 10 and 11 were in development simultaneously too but again I’m not sure it’s relevant for this comparison)

@get2sammyb it’s not shenmue if it doesn’t underperform!

(Iirc the original game cost so much to make that it needed to effectively be bought by every Dreamcast owner to make a profit )

@Deadlyblack I would be amazed if this did this now and then decided not to explain it in the dlc.

@Oram77 isn’t Requiem set 28 years after re2 and 13 years after 6? At this point it could be anyone.

@Oram77 Why would that specific day of re2 need to determine their fictional chemistry afterwards? I’ve no skin in this debate I just find the logic odd

@Reeneman not sure if satire, but The Pro literally has designated hardware blocks for running PSSR.

@zebric21 The Pro has additional hardware ML capabilities which are being used by PSSR. The base model can only do so much without them.

@themaladroit I mean most games that aren’t denuvo get cracked very quickly, this really isn’t unusual. Sony don’t do denuvo and steam doesn’t seem that difficult to bypass given how quickly games get cracked.

@KillerIsD34D it’s already running on one 5090 and there will be further optimisation giving it’s not out for 6 months. Plus almost certainly will have different strengths.

I think this will run on the entire 50xx series, with varying results.

@cainhurst94

At the time, Sony had sewn up timed exclusivity on titles like Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo, but behind-the-scenes it was trying to lock down Starfield as well.

That motivated the Redmond firm to take action, and it bought the entire publisher, eventually tying auteur Todd Howard’s new title down as a console exclusive.

Is there any evidence for this alleged motivation? The owner was wanting to sell Zenimax for some time, EA were involved at one point. I think the wider catalog was of more interest than simply Starfield, otherwise they could have just bought Bethesda instead of paying much more for the parent company.

@belmont we would then be complaining a Sony published game needed a multi gb mandatory install to play the game

@Jacko11 it means the disc was full

@belmont 92gb on disc, they presumably didn't feel it was worth another disc. Without knowing what that content is its hard to say if they made the right decision or not. Is there any word on how much space this content will take?

21:9 on Ps5. How curious.

@CielloArc It's not out for at least 6 months, I can't see it being 5090 only, they will be doing a lot of optimisation. But it will be 50xx only, and there will probably be "quality" sliders/modes for it and they might be be necessary for it to work on say a 5070.

@TrollOfWar short term, no because AMD are so far behind on stuff like this coupled with the amount of people on older cards. Long term, who knows. It depends on how the tech is used.

Grace is an extreme example, AC Shadows is more subtle and Oblivion is in the middle. It’s hard to say right now which of those styles will gain more traction

@RedRiot193 will 100% be an optional toggle jus like every other dlss feature has been

@RedRiot193 Well devs will be for it because their games instantly look "better" with minimal effort from them.

I suspect the final result will be have more control over elements of it's implementation..

@CielloArc The two 5090s were used for the demo, but Nvidia have apparently already optimised it down to a single 5090 with the expectation it will run on the whole 50 series by its release date which is probably 6 months out..

@dskatter @AdamNovice Certainly on the video they do address the controversial elements of it.

It is technically impressive and it's natural for DF to wax lyrical about the technical impressiveness of it. But it's not as if they ignored the issues either. I'm seeing comments elsewhere about them ignoring artist intentions but they absolutely talked bout that n the video

The Grace shot is particularly damming, but some of the other examples look far more reasonable.

I do however think the video is worse for being recorded like 5 minutes after the demo. Perhaps it would have benefitted from being done the next day. Personally I think it's technically impressive but looks more artificial than natural and the face work needs scaling way back, and realistically will probably have to be just for performance.

@SodaPop6548 Someone from Korea flew to Germany to hand John a PS5 Pro with the non final build on it. Not a joke, but Johns own words (this weeks weekly show went out to patrons a day early this week).

So DF have only showed what they had access to. Why that was the version chosen by the dev is probably because they want to show it at its best.

Why the developers simply couldn’t have put out videos themselves is a mystery. Another mystery is why they only had a non final non-pssr2 build to show this close to launch?

On the other hand they put out a comprehensive breakdown of modes and how they are set which is more than most devs.

It’s all a bit odd really.

Can anyone clarify if this is playable single player? I got the impression from official quotes some of it is but some of it is high end MP only?

To my shame I still haven’t finished it but I’ve effectively done everything to platinum it apart from the point of no return and the ring toss game (which didn’t seem to work properly imo). This might stop me immediately putting it on eBay once that’s done if it has SP content.

@somnambulance

Surely it can’t help them that Capcom and Square are starting to give more support to other platforms at this point. Requiem and Pragmata launching day and date on Switch in particular probably hurts Sony.

Requiem sold 4x more copies on PS5 than Switch 2 in Japan. 38k on Switch 2 doesn't seem that much for a 4.5m install base. It's half the number of Switch 2's sold that week. I don't think it's a big issue for Sony.

Switch 2 getting more big budget and technical games is more down to having a decent hardware spec this time. It's more than good enough to handle these games in portable mode. I think it's fine, some games will just sell more on one or the other but they aren't necessarily fighting over each others meal. DQ VII remastered is pretty much split between the two but other games will sell more on PS5 and others more on Sw2.

I think there is room for market expansion rather than Nintendo necessarily biting too much into Sony's sales.

@datamonkey That'll be the Japan studio making games the Japanese buyers weren't exactly buying in droves? Japan Studio's success dropped off hugely after ps2 and the studio went through several internal reboots. The only really successful Japan Studio games were the ones they produced for outside developers. There is a reason they expanded the Astro Bot team and removed everything else (external producing for Japan is now handled by Xdev, who were already doing Europe and the US)

@datamonkey Less than Nintendo merging their handheld and console operations into one instead of having separate machines. The Switch changed everything in Japan. one machine, more sales, every Nintendo game is on one machine. Everyone wins apart from Sony (Microsoft in Japan are a rounding error)

Let's be clear, Nintendo's handhelds were outselling Sony in Japan well before Sony reorganised their operations ( Sony's wider Japanese operations went through huge restructuring some years ago, which may or may not be part of PlayStation's HQ moving to the US). We should assume Switch sells more units from being portable in Japan than as a tv console.

@Oram77 It does seem to be coming in hot. The DF coverage is based on a pre release build. Which seems very late to not have the release build.

I'll be playing on PC eventually so it won't affect me but I think they could have handled all of this a lot better. It's especially baffling because the game looks amazing and there was/is a danger of it all backfiring a little.

@AinsleyE

FFXIV really is the only thing that makes them happy.

DQ Online too, but that's Japan only.