It’s hard to imagine a company with a greater influence on consumer electronics than Sony. You can trace a direct line from the Walkman -- the first portable media player -- to the smartphone. Today Sony is a massive force in gaming, making the PlayStation and publishing games for it and other platforms. Sony image sensors are in iPhones as well as its own mirrorless cameras. Not to mention the OLED TVs; smartphones; noise-canceling headphones; music, tv, and film publishing; and, yes, robot dogs.
Bungie is wrapping up the light and darkness saga with Destiny 2: The Final Shape, and we’re about to hear a lot more about this giant DLC. Bungie is holding a special showcase today at 9AM PT / 12PM ET / 5PM UK. Things will kickoff an hour earlier if you want to tune into an hour-long pre-show, but the main show will deliver details on The Final Shape, today’s season 22, and the future of Destiny 2.
and wondered how an unlicensed two hour film could exist when even Disney had to negotiate with Sony to use the character in films. Sony, Disney, and Marvel are all very protective of the character so it’s a surprise to see this film still live. It’s also super unusual to see a fan film of this scope outside of the Star Trek fan film community, especially as the last time a Star Trek fan film attempted a project of this high a production quality level Paramount sued the creator.
Spider-Man: Lotus’s other major problem is it was funded by a non-profit more than two years ago and immediately faced challenges after the VFX team quit due to racist remarks previously made, separately, by the lead actor and the director.
[Yahoo Entertainment]
Rumors about the design of a “slim” PlayStation 5 redesign featuring the detachable Blu-ray drive we’d heard about seem to have boomeranged from a Twitter / X post describing it as “shorter not thinner” to a Chinese forum and back to Twitter.
The largest grains of salt are attached here, but we’ll see if more leaks follow — the original account that posted about it claims to have a video (which hasn’t been posted yet, if it ever will be).
Sony sold 3.3 million PS5’s in the three months ended June 30th, up from 2.4 million consoles in the same period last year. But the end of the PS5 shortage isn’t the only good news for Sony; the comparatively weak Japanese yen also contributed to higher sales across its games, music, and financial units, Bloomberg notes.
What the Golf?, the only existing golf game (says me), comes to PS4 and PS5 “with all current updates later this year,” says a press release sent to The Verge.
Also, developer Triband is updating the Switch and Steam versions with the Among Us-inspired levels.
If you’ve never played What the Golf?... here, watch the Switch trailer.
With no movement on resolving Hollywood’s strikes by actors and writers, the third animated Spider-Man movie, Beyond the Spider-Verse is going from March 29th, 2024 (a date now filled by the sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife) to entirely unscheduled.
Gran Turismo will have a “sneak peek” launch on its previously scheduled August 11th date, but plans for more showings have been pushed back to the 25th.
Kraven the Hunter was set for October 6th and has been pushed back to August 30th, 2024, while Venom 3 now has a release date of July 12th, 2024, and fellow Spider-Man spinoff Madame Web moved up two days to February 16th.
8
Verge Score
Sony’s latest flagship earbuds are excellent on multiple fronts, but the lack of an ecosystem will hold them back in the not-too-distant future.
We knew it was over a billion dollars, but PlayStation boss Jim Ryan’s unredacted letter suggests CoD represented $800 million in PlayStation revenue in the United States alone, and — I think that says $1.5 billion, right? — worldwide. (That’s in 2021 specifically.)
Those players represent way more money to Sony than that, though: Ryan says CoD players spend (what looks to me like) $15.9 billion per year, on average, on everything else they buy.
Then again, some PlayStation gamers play nothing but CoD, we just learned.
While we listen to Dr. Bailey’s testimony, a storm is unfolding elsewhere in the FTC v. Microsoft case. The court uploaded a document earlier from Sony that included confidential financial information that wasn’t properly redacted. Now all the documents have suddenly disappeared.
It looks like some redacted the documents with a pen and when you scan them in it’s easy to see the redactions. Reporters and Sony’s competition will have downloaded all the documents as they were in the public domain, so the damage is done:
• Horizon Forbidden West apparently cost $212 million over five years with 300 employees
• 1 million gamers play nothing but Call of Duty
• Sony says only one more Call of Duty game was guaranteed to come to PlayStation
That’s according to Sony gaming boss Jim Ryan, whose redacted letter to the FTC wasn’t redacted all that well...
Here’s what my elf eyes see in the text:
In 2021, over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty. In 2021, Call of Duty players spent an average of [116?] hours per year playing Call of Duty. Call of Duty players spending more than 70 percent of their time on Call of Duty spent an average of 296 hours on the franchise.
So yeah, Sony certainly would miss out on some some console/subscription sales if CoD someday becomes Xbox exclusive.
We knew that Sony’s marketing deal with Activision expired in 2024, but that apparently doesn’t include a 2024 installment of CoD.
“[T]he last game covered by the contract is a Call of Duty title to be released in late 2023,” reads part of a letter from PlayStation boss Jim Ryan that someone didn’t properly redact.
Still, Activision reportedly planned to bring CoD games to PlayStation with or without the contract, and Microsoft has repeatedly promised the same.
