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.
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.
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.
The A9 III’s selling point is its global shutter that enables uncropped 120fps 4K video. The A9 also captures 120 frames before the shutter is pressed (with optional shutter sound for emphasis). It’s also expected to get in-camera authenticity to weed its shots out from AI fakes.
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.
As of about noon ET, some say it’s resolved, and downloads are working again after a console restart. However, just like the issues earlier this week where players were “permanently banned” for a little while, Sony’s status page indicates all is well, its social media accounts are silent, and PR hasn’t responded to questions.
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.
There’s almost nothing to mourn in Sony’s list of disappearing shows (apart from 20 seasons of Mythbusters, that is), but it’s an annoying reminder of the woefully ethereal nature of online digital entertainment.
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.
It seems nifty for pros doing school pictures, but dang, I don’t look forward to more paywalled camera features that squeeze pros.
[Sony Digital Imaging News via PixelShift Studio]
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)
Okay, so you don’t actually have to hear the sound of an early PC crashing — there’s no mechanical shutter. But this is an awful noise, and I love that it’s there.
The company tested baking a cryptographic “digital signature” into photos taken by its cameras to set them apart from AI-generated or otherwise faked images. Sony says the feature will come to cameras like the Alpha 9 III via a firmware update in Spring 2024.
The company says it now expects to release six live service titles by March 2026, half what it previously planned. Bloomberg has said Sony’s teams are having “mixed levels of success” with the live services push, and that it has cut back the team working on its Last of Us multiplayer title. Even Sony-owned Destiny 2 developer Bungie has been hit with layoffs and delays.
[Video Games Chronicle]
