The PlayStation 4 - Page 46

Following Chief Executive Officer Jim Ryan’s presentation about the future of the PlayStation Business at Sony’s Investor Relations Day 2019, a questions & answers session was hosted, and the executive provided more interesting insight on a variety of topics.

Vice-Presidents John Kodera and Kazuhiko Takeda also helped out with answering the questions.

First of all, we hear about the exploration of a partnership with Microsoft, and Ryan mentioned that it’s a “broad memorandum of understanding between Sony Corporation and Microsoft” which touches on a number of areas of which game streaming is only one.

Sony has comprehensively reviewed the landscape of potential partnerships and they view the possibility of working with Microsoft as one that provides “great benefit” between the two partners.

That being said, Ryan clarified that “as of now there is no partnership between Sony and Microsoft” as they simply signed a memorandum of understanding committing them to explore potential partnerships.

After those exploratory talks, if an agreement is reached on high-level principles, only then the two parties will start looking at business models.

A potential partnership with Microsoft would provide the opportunity to move to something that’s “less capital intensive” than the current form of PlayStation Now. Yet, this has still to be studied.

To a further question, Ryan mentioned that Sony is “broadly happy” with the ratio of 20% of the market taken by first-party games and 80% by third-party games. It allows the house of PlayStation to have “critical mass” and return of investment on its third-party studios.

On top of that, allowing third-parties to take an 80% market share positions PlayStation as the “publisher-friendly platform.” This has been an approach that Sony has taken since the very start. According to Ryan publishers “enjoy working with PlayStation” and thanks to the massive hardware installed base, there is plenty of opportunities to monetize for partners.

The 20-80% ratio has roughly been the same in past generations, and Sony considers it “about the correct one.”

Speaking of PlayStation Now, Ryan mentioned that Sony has studied extensively what users of the service feel about it, and the quality of the service in terms of lag and breakage doesn’t feature that highly among the points of friction and isn’t included in the top three things that gamers would like to see changed.

While Sony is never complacent and they always strive to make the user experience better, they don’t see this as a critical area of weakness.

Talking about backward compatibility for the upcoming next-gen console, the key point for Ryan is that in a network era backward compatibility is “something that’s extremely powerful” as the game community is “somewhat tribal in its nature” and backward compatibility gives them the opportunity to migrate from PS4 to next-gen while still being able to play their older games with their existing friends.

Sony expects backward compatibility to be a “really critical success factor” for its next-gen consoles and thinks it’s “incredibly important.”

Kodera-san added that backward compatibility is positive not simply because you can play old games on the next-gen console, but also because the community can enjoy the games together via cross-generation gameplay.

Ryan also talked about the Chinese market, mentioning that it’s a very large one, and it’s clearly of interest to any gaming company. With that said, the censorship situation in China in the past year has been “very extreme.” Ryan has spent a considerable amount of his own time visiting China and formulating plans and grow the market there, but those plans had to be put on hold as no new games have been published there due to the approval suspension.

In the long-term, Sony “absolutely” sees China as an area of potential opportunity, but for now, they’re not aggressively investing in the country until the situation around censorship clarifies itself.

The PlayStation 5 won't waste as much energy as the PlayStation 4, Sony has said.

In a post on the PlayStation Blog, Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Jim Ryan said the PS5's suspend gameplay feature will consume less power than the PS4's suspend gameplay.

Ryan said Sony estimates the PS5 suspend gameplay can be achieved at around 0.5 W.

"If just one million users enable this feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1000 US homes," Ryan said.

The announcement comes as part of the Playing for the Planet alliance, a new partnership set to appear at the UN Climate Summit.

Ryan will be there, he said, alongside others from the video game industry "to make formal commitments to contribute to the efforts of the UN Environment committee".

Ryan said power consumption savings on PS4 had a real impact. "For context, we estimate the carbon emissions we have avoided to date already amount to almost 16m metric tons, increasing to 29m metric tons over the course of the next 10 years (which equals the CO2 emissions for the nation of Denmark in 2017)."

Elsewhere, Ryan said Sony will investigate potential PS VR applications that can raise awareness of climate issues and climate experts.

Ever since the original PlayStation hit the market in 1994, Sony's series of videogame consoles has stuck to the numbers. No "Super," no "Max," no "Code Red Xtreme"; just PlayStations 2, 3, and 4. With such unwavering consistency, the name of the next iteration has been a question only in the most technical sense—but Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan is still ready to answer it. The console, he tells me, will be called PlayStation 5. "It's nice to be able to say it," he says. "Like a giant burden has been lifted from my shoulders."

So. There you go. PlayStation 5, holidays 2020.

Sony hasn't said too much about the console since April, when WIRED broke the story about development efforts on what was then known only as the "next-gen console." In fact, the company hasn't said anything. Sony skipped games show E3 this year, a void during which Microsoft unveiled details about its own next-gen console, a successor to the Xbox One referred to only as Project Scarlett. Like the PS5, Scarlett will boast a CPU based on AMD’s Ryzen line and a GPU based on its Navi family; like the PS5, it will ditch the spinning hard drive for a solid-state drive. Now, though, in a conference room at Sony’s US headquarters, Ryan and system architect Mark Cerny are eager to share specifics.

Before they do, Cerny wants to clarify something. When we last discussed the forthcoming console, he spoke about its ability to support ray-tracing, a technique that can enable complex lighting and sound effects in 3D environments. Given the many questions he’s received since, he fears he may have been ambiguous about how the PS5 would accomplish this—and confirms that it’s not a software-level fix, which some had feared. “There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware,” he says, “which I believe is the statement that people were looking for.” (A belief born out by my own Twitter mentions, which for a couple of weeks in April made a graphics-rendering technique seem like the only thing the internet had ever cared about.)

With that in hand, back to the PS5's solid-state drive, which Cerny first extolled for the way it can turn loading time from a hassle to a blink. It’s not just the speed that makes the SSD formidablwe, he says, but the efficiency it offers. Think about the hard drive in a game console, spinning like a 5400-rpm vinyl record. For the console to read a piece of information off the drive, it first has to send out the disk head—like a turntable needle—to find it. Each “seek,” as it’s known, may only entail a scant handful of milliseconds, but seeks add up. To minimize them, developers will often duplicate certain game assets in order to form contiguous data blocks, which the drive can read faster. We’re talking common stuff here: lampposts, anonymous passersby.

But data adds up too. "If you look at a game like Marvel's Spider-Man," Cerny says, "there are some pieces of data duplicated 400 times on the hard drive." The SSD sweeps away the need for all that duping—so not only is its raw read speed dramatically faster than a hard drive, but it saves crucial space. How developers will take advantage of that space will likely differ; some may opt to build a larger or more detailed game world, others may be content to shrink the size of the games or patches. Either way, physical games for the PS5 will use 100GB optical disks, inserted into an optical drive that doubles as a 4K Bluray player.

However, game installation (which is mandatory, given the speed difference between the SSD and the optical drive) will be a bit different than in the PS4. This time around, aided in part by the simplified game data possible with the SSD, Sony is changing its approach to storage, making for a more configurable installation—and removal—process. "Rather than treating games like a big block of data," Cerny says, "we're allowing finer-grained access to the data." That could mean the ability to install just a game's multiplayer campaign, leaving the single-player campaign for another time, or just installing the whole thing and then deleting the single-player campaign once you've finished it.

Regardless of what parts of a game you choose to install and play, you'll be able to stay abreast of it via a completely revamped user interface. The PS4's bare-bones home screen at times feels frozen in amber; you can see what your friends have recently done, or even what game title they might be playing at the moment, but without launching an individual title, there's no way to tell what single-player missions you could do or what multiplayer matches you can join. The PS5 will change that. "Even though it will be fairly fast to boot games, we don't want the player to have to boot the game, see what's up, boot the game, see what's up," Cerny says. "Multiplayer game servers will provide the console with the set of joinable activities in real time. Single-player games will provide information like what missions you could do and what rewards you might receive for completing them—and all of those choices will be visible in the UI. As a player you just jump right into whatever you like."

He says this like he says many other things: knowing he'll fend off any follow-up question that ventures beyond what he wants to talk about. Like, What does the UI actually look like? Or, How big will the SSD be? Or even, Is that a microphone? Which is exactly what I ask when Cerny hands me a prototype of the next-generation controller, an unlabeled matte-black doohickey that looks an awful lot like the PS4's DualShock 4. After all, there's a little hole on it, and a recently published patent points to Sony developing a voice-driven AI assistant for the PlayStation. But all I get from Cerny is, "We'll talk more about it another time." ("We file patents on a regular basis," a spokesperson tells me later, "and like many companies, some of those patents end up in our products, and some don’t.")

The controller (which history suggests will one day be called the DualShock 5, though Cerny just says "it doesn't have a name yet") does have some features Cerny's more interested in acknowledging. One is "adaptive triggers" that can offer varying levels of resistance to make shooting a bow and arrow feel like the real thing—the tension increasing as you pull the arrow back—or make a machine gun feel far different from a shotgun. It also boasts haptic feedback far more capable than the rumble motor console gamers are used to, with highly programmable voice-coil actuators located in the left and right grips of the controller.

Combined with an improved speaker on the controller, the haptics can enable some astonishing effects. First, I play through a series of short demos, courtesy of the same Japan Studio team that designed PlayStation VR's Astro Bot Rescue Mission. In the most impressive, I ran a character through a platform level featuring a number of different surfaces, all of which gave distinct—and surprisingly immersive—tactile experiences. Sand felt slow and sloggy; mud felt slow and soggy. On ice, a high-frequency response made the thumbsticks really feel like my character was gliding. Jumping into a pool, I got a sense of the resistance of the water; on a wooden bridge, a bouncy sensation.

Next, a version of Gran Turismo Sport that Sony had ported over to a PS5 devkit—a devkit that on quick glance looks a lot like the one Gizmodo reported on last week. (The company refused to comment on questions about how the devkit's form factor might compare to what's being considered for the consumer product.) Driving on the border between the track and the dirt, I could feel both surfaces. Doing the same thing on the same track using a DualShock 4 on a PS4, that sensation disappeared entirely. It wasn't that the old style rumble feedback paled in comparison, it was that there was no feedback at all. User tests found that rumble feedback was too tiring to use continuously, so the released version of GT Sport simply didn't use it.

That difference has been a long time coming. Product manager Toshi Aoki says the controller team has been working on haptic feedback since the DualShock 4 was in development. They even could have included it in PS4 Pro, the mid-cycle refresh—though doing so would have created a "split experience" for gamers, so the feature suite was held for the next generation. There are some other small improvements over the DualShock 4. The next-gen controller uses a USB Type-C connector for charging (and you can play through the cable as well). Its larger-capacity battery and haptics motors make the new controller a bit heavier than the DualShock 4, but Aoki says it will still come in a bit lighter than the current Xbox controller "with batteries in it."

How game studios will use all these new features—from previously known ones like the SSD and ray-tracing acceleration to newer ones like the controller and real-time UI—is still a matter of some speculation. While a number of studios already had their PS5 devkits, the controller prototypes began rolling out much more recently, and no one is ready to name specific titles they're developing for the PS5. "We're working on a big one right now," says Marco Thrush, president of Bluepoint Games, which most recently worked on last year's PS4 remake of Shadow of the Colossus. "I'll let you figure out the rest."

That doesn't mean they're not exploring. "The SSD has me really excited," Thrush says. "You don't need to do gameplay hacks anymore to artificially slow players down—lock them behind doors, anything like that. Back in the cartridge days, games used to load instantly; we're kind of going back to what consoles used to be."

"I could be really specific and talk about experimenting with ambient occlusion techniques, or the examination of ray-traced shadows," says Laura Miele, chief studio officer for EA. "More generally, we’re seeing the GPU be able to power machine learning for all sorts of really interesting advancements in the gameplay and other tools." Above all, Miele adds, it's the speed of everything that will define the next crop of consoles. "We're stepping into the generation of immediacy. In mobile games, we expect a game to download in moments, and to be just a few taps from jumping right in. Now we’re able to tackle that in a big way."

That sort of tackle gets a lot easier, Jim Ryan knows, when a burden has been lifted from your shoulders. So say hello to the PlayStation 5, officially. Maybe one of these days we'll all learn what the thing actually looks like.

On January 17 2020 23:12 Harris1st wrote:
Lots of leaks say the reveal in February is true and also much else, like pricing, exclusive games, ...

I really like that Sony and Microsoft keep pushing each other