Sony

Joe Blackburn, Destiny 2’s current game director, has just announced he is leaving Bungie next month. Tyson Green, who previously worked on Halo PvP, is taking over as game director. “Tyson has been a critical part of Bungie’s legacy since Myth II,” says Blackburn in a post on X. Blackburn’s departure comes months after Bungie was forced to delay its Destiny 2: The Final Shape expansion to June, amid around 100 layoffs at the PlayStation studio.

Sony shipped 10 million PS5s in just five months last year, and Xbox hardware sales were up 3 percent last quarter. But AMD, whose gaming business provides their chips, is forecasting a “significant double-digit percentage” decline in gaming revenue now that we’re in “the fifth year of what has been a very strong gaming cycle.”

The show floor only just opened yesterday, but we got a glimpse at a ton of cool new products, prototypes, and features:

It’s all of five seconds, but Sony snuck in a short look at the upcoming film, based on the Gravity Rush game series, into its CES 2024 press conference. You can see the clip starting at 22:12.

In an incredibly unsurprising Sony tie-in, the car will be added to Gran Turismo 7 as part of a patch update “later this year,” according to a blog post. You can get an idea of what it will look like in the game in a new trailer.

Sony apparently wants to let you add themes to the screens inside its Afeela EV prototype, as shown at CES 2024. Its examples? Themes of Across the Spider-Verse, a Sony movie, and Fortnite, made by Epic Games, which Sony has invested in.

That was the setup, anyway, during this CES presentation. But I was watching Izumi Kawanishi, Afeela’s president and COO, as he was steering the latest prototype onto the stage, and I would swear he didn’t move his thumbs at all. Plus, he then made a comment about how this was just for tech demo purposes. So color me skeptical. But either way, at least someone is trying to make my dream of car controllers come true.

While kicking off Sony’s CES 2024 press conference, CEO Kenichiro Yoshida mentioned some of the Sony Pictures highlights on the way, including a particularly interesting partnership with Nintendo. All we got was that “This live action film will deliver an amazing tale of adventure and discovery,” whenever it’s eventually released.

Sony may again not be showing any TVs at CES this year, but it’s still going to take the stage to talk about “technologies and initiatives that support creators.” Last year, the company showed off an electric car called the Afeela, which had a built-in PS5 and a screen on the front.

Sony is no longer abiding by the industry norm of announcing its latest and greatest TVs at CES each year.

A report from Kotaku has examined some of the documents released as a part of a malicious ransomware attack on Spider-Man 2 developer Insomniac Games. The documents reveal that Insomniac spent $300 million on the game’s development, roughly $30 million over budget, and that the game needs to sell 7 million copies at full price to break even.

France’s national competition regulator, the Autorité de la concurrence, has fined Sony €13.5 million (approximately $14.8 million USD) for “abusing its dominant position” as the official manufacturer of PlayStation 4 controllers.

Nikkei Asia reported that Sony’s fast new camera is coming to the US on February 21st, which is consistent with estimated deliveries for pre-orders.

For several hours on Friday, PS5 owners have been reporting a “CE-107928-7” corruption error when they try to download or update games. It was bad enough that at least one developer acknowledged the issue, and we saw it on our systems, too.

And wow, I do not have them. So I flew to Berlin to learn from a “Promptographer,” and I came home with more generated pancakes than I know what to do with.

The Access controller, which is designed to offer a more accommodating way for people with disabilities to play PS5 games, is now widely available to buy for $89.99 / €89.99. To mark the occasion, Sony has put out a video featuring some of the people it consulted with on the project, showing the different configurations the controller can be used in.

Kotaku wrote yesterday that PlayStation owners will lose “previously purchased Discovery content” on December 31st after a change in Sony’s licensing agreements.

Sony has an upcoming gridline tool for its Alpha cameras that seems helpful for commercial photographers. But unlike free firmware updates, this one will cost $149 when it launches in March — just to add four custom grid overlays to their cameras.

Too bad it was “damn near useless,” as Colin from the This Does Not Compute YouTube channel put it in his look back on the P series and some other Weird Sony laptops from the early 2000s.

This noise is the price you’ll pay for the uncropped 4K 120fps shots of the Sony A9 III’s global shutter that’s supposed to fix the distortion caused by the usual rolling shutter. (Well, really the price is $5,999)