They’re simply saying that Xbox’s promise to keep Activision software on PlayStation “long-term” is likely only going to last for this console generation, and will end around the time of the PS6. This is their attempt at putting the phrase “long-term” into perspective. This isn’t an announcement or leak on the scale of the GTA 6 leak. Just Sony stating the obvious fact that the PS5 will not be their only console for the rest of time.
That Microsoft is going to abuse its ownership of Activision is a certainty. They've already proclaimed they will only keep certain franchises on PlayStation for several more years after the merger succeeds.
This merger needs to be stopped dead in its tracks. If competition authorities allow this merger they're factually legalizing market abuse.
It's a very ironic argument from the platform that most aggressively pursues exclusives IMO. They frequently negotiate timed exclusive deals even with multiplatform games or negotiate clauses that forbid smaller game studios from publishing on Microsoft's Game Pass. MS has been criticized for years for having comparatively poor exclusives, and they try to fix it to find their primary competitor cries murder.
Counterpoint 1: The low barriers to entry of the video game industry make it easy for new players to disrupt the space if Microsoft wants to abuse its position.
Counterpoint 2: The product is video games at the end of the day. It's not exactly as important as life saving drugs or internet service providers, where antitrust resources are more needed. There is an unlimited number of ways for consumers to entertain themselves.
Sony is very competitive in terms of first-party games, multiplayer shooters are maybe a special case. For single player story-heavy games Sony studies are probably the largest developers and publisher.
Multiplayer games compete more directly, and you need to get a large enough playerbase to make them attractive. Which puts large, established franchises in a much better position than new and unknown ones.
> “Even assuming that SIE had the ability and resources to develop a similarly successful franchise to Call of Duty, it would take many, many years and billions of dollars to create a challenger to Call of Duty – and the example of EA’s Battlefield shows that any such efforts would more than likely be unsuccessful."
The industry as a whole would be a lot better off if platform-studio vertical integration were banned, and strict financing-only co-ops set up as counterweights to EA/Activision accumulation.
So no company that owns a platform should be able to release its own software? Should a platform owner be able to fund a third party studio to produce content? Should the courts force a game maker to support all platforms?
The intent is to prohibit platforms from leveraging their greater capital reserves to purchase and permanently acquire (and platform-limit) those who make software, thereby decreasing competition between platforms and increasing profits.
There's never been an industry where this worked well for the consumer or society. See: ATT, IBM, Microsoft, Apple.
Microsoft released Word and Excel on Macs before it was released on its own platforms and has been available on Macs for 40 years. PowerPoint started on the Mac. An Office 365 subscription works across Macs, Windows, iOS and Android.
Apple has never had anywhere near a monopoly on any platform. AT&T had a government mandated monopoly.
What major software company has Apple acquired aside from NeXT?
Microsoft has always had a love/hate obsession with monopolization. In the early days, they were famous for stating that strategically they wanted to be the platform people-who-were-not-MS made software money on, because that was how you became a dominant platform.
But of course that buckled at various times (first with proto-Office vs 1-2-3 & WordPerfect, then with the 90s dominance / Encarta-era smorgasbord of random MS software).
Excel was released on Mac because Microsoft wasn't confident in directly challenging 1-2-3 (on DOS) or early-Windows capabilities. And ultimately, it was exactly the fact that Microsoft owned the OS that allowed them to dominate in office apps and browsers in the 90s/00s.
Apple has had a monopoly on two device platforms (iPods, then iOS) and has abused both of them to its own profit.
ATT didn't have a government mandated monopoly: it had a series of every-few-decades consent decrees in which it bargained with the US government to avoid being nationalized. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment
Interesting thing is that Battlefield is a 20 year old franchise with about a dozen mainline releases, has sold tens of millions of copies, and has likely generated billions in revenue for EA. It's a wildly successful franchise by any metric other than "compared to Call of Duty".
i was thinking exactly that! I have not played in years, but if I had to choose, i would always opt for battlefield over COD. Well at least since BF 1942.
It doesn't really leak a release date, just when they say they plan to stop making Activision games available on Playstation. IMO it's ambiguous about whether that means they'll continue to make new games for the Playstation platform as soon as the merger is concluded, it could be that they are just allowing the back catalogue to remain up on PSN until 2027.
It still is extremely competitive, merely for the fact that it's $500.
You cannot, today, get any good GPU for less than that price. An RTX3060 is $439 (if you can find one), the Intel Arc A770 is $350 if I remember correctly. A midrange gaming PC these days will easily cost you over a thousand dollars, more if you're still looking to get the scalped out cards.
Of course, it's awfully restricted, and dear fucking god I wish I could at least write custom software for it. A PS5 + Moonlight for streaming games that are on the PC still would be amazing.
I doubt they are doing mid gen refreshes this time.
Previous gen it made sense due to 4K TVs getting traction, this time even 2 years into the new cycle consoles are still hard to find, some have already even increased prices (PS5) and MS is already talking about them raising prices too.
Plus, not many truly next-gen games have been released so far.
Does anyone find this interesting compared to the smartphone market where Apple and Samsung are pushing out $1k phones _every single year_?
You can say it's hard to find a PS5 at MSRP ($499 or $399 if digital) but it's still on a multi year (+5 at least) release cycle. Whereas the current iPhone generation (14) starts at $799 and $999. And next year you get a new one, and the next year another. And prices will increase too. I don't know the whole thing is just crazy to me.
Even if you did buy a new iPhone every year, all of your apps, content, and services immediately port over to the new device. An iPhone doesn't ask you for $60 to run the Facebook app on the latest model.
Besides that you're presupposing someone buys a new iPhone every year and that an iPhone doesn't have any more utility than a game console. Despite the capabilities of modern consoles they're mainly used for games and secondarily for streaming. For a not insignificant number of people their smartphone is their primary computing device. Smartphones are used for more and more often than gaming consoles. I also don't know a single person that buys a new iPhone every year. Even the most well off people I know that are iPhone fans upgrade only every other year.
Sony has had a weird history around backwards compatibility, Microsoft didn't really bother until the latest generation of their consoles, and Nintendo is pretty much allergic to the idea. Not only do consoles not do as much for people as smartphones but they require an investment in new games when you do upgrade.
makes sense to me. your phone is a huge part of you. it’s value is growing. today you might carry a wallet with you. you won’t every day in 5 years. your phone will become your entire source of identity, finances, contact. you have your phone at all times or know where it is. game consoles are nothing like this. just like game consoles you aren’t buying a new phone each year. but they are worth the money
For scheduling: Consoles guarantee near perfect compatibility in a way that phones don't. And if you upgrade every two years you can trade in or sell the old phone for half the price of the new phone.
As for the price, small is expensive, and the cost per hour of use is not a lot. Also plenty of phones are much cheaper. The high-end mirror of consoles is a gaming PC.
Putting out a $1,000 console every year would be self-defeating in another way - a console has two value propositions:
1. Platform exclusives.
2. It's cheaper than a computer.
Otherwise, it's a gimped computer that won't run most of the stuff you want and is difficult to use.
Putting out a new model every year will make your console significantly more expensive than getting a computer. If you raise the price to $1,000, it will make your console insanely more expensive than getting a computer.
Also, no fooling around with graphics drivers, wondering if your rig's specs are good enough etc. On the other hand, gaming PC have mouse+keyboard input.
Consoles themselves are typically sold at cost or loss even. Sony makes majority of the money on games and associated services. In that model it just makes sense keep the release cycle as long as possible.
In the phone business there are associated services too, but the hardware itself can be immensely profitable.
> And next year you get a new one, and the next year another
You can't wear your PS5 to flaunt how rich, current, stylish, trendy you are.
People are happy to shell out money for a status symbols. US practice of contract subsidizing the price of the phone helped it greatly, when even high schoolers could get it.
Yes because in a country where 50% of the people own an iPhone and you can get one by working 5 hours on minimum wage per month, it’s really a “status symbol” to have the same thing everyone else has and it shows you are “rich” that you can afford to pay $30/month.
Playstation 5 is still experiencing shortages even after all this time, you can only really find one if you join a wait list or pay a markup. The game catalog leaves more to be desired as well, I can only find like 3 games right now specifically for PS5 that are not also on PC worth playing, but fine, maybe that's more to do with me specifically. Either way, can we maybe resolve the current shortages before looking forward to the next one?
This is a leak from court documents that indicates that the PS6 will probably be released in 5 years at the soonest. So there is still a lot of time.
And I don't think the PS5 is that hard to get by now, though of course this will vary by region.
Most games are still cross-generation, but that is always the case. And they do look better on the PS5, though obviously they can't really take full advantage of the new capabilities, especially the much faster storage. But e.g. Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok still look very, very good on the PS5 and are not available on PC, even though they are cross-gen.
> And I don't think the PS5 is that hard to get by now, though of course this will vary by region.
I just double checked online, which is why I mentioned that, without typing in my zip code. Best Buy: sold out, Amazon: available by invitation, eBay: selling at $700 vs $500 anywhere else. So like I said, either sold out or at a markup that is not currently worth it.
I got mine over a year ago by following a bot that tweeted when it was in stock at a few large retailers. Didn't take that long, and I also didn't have to be extremely fast (e.g. using a bot that automatically buys). I assume it is better now, and from what I've heard it might be more available in retail stores and not online, where the scalpers tend to buy out the stock. Though I hope we're close to the point where it doesn't really pay off for the scalpers anymore.
What are the 3 games? Returnal should be on that list, amazing game and uses unique PS5 controller features. If you haven’t played The Last Of Us then I would say that is a must even though that was a PS4 title but is a PS exclusive. Death Loop is an awesome game as well. might be on PC, I dunno since I only game on PS.
To me there is a huge jump in graphics quality from PS4 to PS5. It will take time for game devs to get games out that use better graphics, etc. and the PS6 is likely a half decade away or longer, these things never are early.
I used to game on PC but got sick of upgrades costing more than a console, having to tweak settings, deal with Windows, etc. when I just want to jump into a game.
God of War Ragnarök, Horizon Forbidden West, and Returnal are the 3 PS5 exclusive games I would immediately want to buy if I had the console (yes I am aware they are mentioned in other comments as well, I legitimately did a google search first and those stood out for me vs the rest). Have used the same gaming laptop for 2 years or so now and works great for my needs, the only incompatibility I ran into was a warning message about my graphics card or drivers before playing Ghostwire: Tokyo, but it still ended up being one of the most stunning games I've played for PC and noticed 0 bugs.
Sure, it's just surprising that we are already looking forward to 2028 for PS6 when the current PS5 release is still so completely botched and unresolved.
Don’t think is as botched as you think. It’s tracking in sales closely to the PS4, which if you think about it it’s pretty good considering the pandemic + supply chain issues.
Even when we will reach the reasonable maximum of transistor shrinking, then GPUs can scale up based on electric power.
If we allocate 1kW for a gaming system, GPUs will be able to scale up a lot more.
That's for theory, then the limiting factor could become the vram unable to feed fast enough the GPU, then we could imagine GPUs with "less vram", but something ultra fast like "only cache memory".
Especially when you read: which is likely to occur around [redacted])