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.
That’s right, cross-platform kombat is coming to the NetherRealm Studios reboot of the classic fighting game.
Players can expect the feature in next week’s patch, and it will include support for PS5, Xbox, and PC, as announced by the game’s official account on X.
Microsoft is bringing Sea of Thieves to the PS5 on April 30th. It’s the second previous Xbox-exclusive that’s coming to PS5, with Hi-Fi Rush available on the PS5 on March 19th. These are part of four Xbox games coming to PS5 and Nintendo Switch:
• Pentiment - PS4, PS5, and Switch on February 22nd
• Hi-Fi Rush - PS5 on March 19th
• Grounded - PS4, PS5, and Switch on April 16th
• Sea of Thieves - PS5 on April 30th
We heard it was coming, and Sony says it’s out today. Here it is. don’t download the old Remake demo by accident!
You can replay Sony’s entire video reveal now: it goes over loads of activities and regions to expect from the game, including Junon, Corel, Costa Del Sol, Cosmo Canyon, and Shinra Manor. Apparently, the game will “ultimately decide Aerith’s fate.”
Update: The demo is now live.
What to expect from today’s State of Play:
☄️”The latest trailer highlighting the charms of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth”
☄️”A special gameplay video showing how the game has been designed with new footage”
☄️A demo that lets you play Cloud or Sephiroth and reportedly explore the world map.
Full game’s out February 29th, stream’s embedded below!
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.”
We won’t hear from Sony again till Valentine’s Day, but Microsoft just confirmed: next quarter, Xbox hardware revenue will decline year-over-year.
Microsoft has internally suggested the next gen of consoles might arrive in 2028.
The show floor only just opened yesterday, but we got a glimpse at a ton of cool new products, prototypes, and features:
• Asus made a portable monitor — and a laptop — with two screens.
• Sony and Honda showed off an Afeela EV prototype that puts Fortnite on your bumper.
• Amazon announced Matter casting support for Prime Video.
• Google and Samsung teamed up to combine Quick Share and Nearby Share into a single sharing solution.
• This AI startup made a little gadget that’s supposed to use your apps for you.
There’s still more to come! Stay tuned to our coverage, and make sure to check out The Verge’s TikTok and Instagram where we go hands-on with new devices.
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.
We still know barely anything else about it, or when it might come out, but at least it’s still in development!
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.
The company has been tight-lipped about what it might show tonight. My money’s on a PS5 with a built-in car.
Sony is no longer abiding by the industry norm of announcing its latest and greatest TVs at CES each year.
The company skipped Vegas and waited until last March to introduce its 2023 lineup. And even then, the lauded A95 QD-OLED TV didn’t actually ship until the fall. Sony is clearly working on a much different timeline than other TV makers these days.
So it should come as no surprise that Digital Trends’ Caleb Denison is reporting that new TVs won’t be part of Sony’s CES 2024 presence. It sounds like the company has made some impressive Mini LED backlighting advancements that will appear in upcoming models — whenever they’re ready.
Sony is still holding a press conference on January 8th, so maybe we’ll get another look at Afeela at this year’s show.
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.
Among the leaked presentations, one slide asks if gamers even noticed the 3x budget increase between Spider-Man 1 and 2.
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.
The company has been sanctioned for its aggressive methods of blocking counterfeit controllers through PS4 firmware updates, which also rendered other third-party gamepads inoperable.
Meanwhile, returning to the current console generation, Sony just announced it has sold over 50 million PS5 consoles. So this fine, like most others targeted at tech giants, is a mere drop in the bucket.
