Sony failed to stick the landing(also it was kind of a mess)

@navster15: yeah, my bet is yes but I don’t know 💯

Sony’s cross saves basically killed “transfarring” so yeah, it’s been a thing for awhile on their platforms

I'll believe that when I see it. Flower and Journey might have done that, but they were exceptions. I had plenty of digital purchases on PS3 that I was expected to buy again if I wanted to play them on PS4. They're damn near Nintendo with that kind of stuff. I guess PS4 never claimed any sort of backwards compatibility, so maybe they're holding themselves to it more now.

@navster15: Been a while (and maybe it was a function of me looking at a lot of janky bandai games) but was it ever a... good sync? From what I recall it was never seamless and usually involved starting a special sync on one device and then finishing the special sync on the other device in a push/pull manner.

Theoretically Sony would have this clean for 4->5 but... Sony are lucky Nintendo is so bad at infrastructure that we give them a pass.

meh- sony's event didn't move the needle one way or the other for me. i never buy day 1 because the value proposition is always at its worst on day 1 for consoles.

most importantly- i think their price is rock solid and exactly where it needed to be (thinking realistically- they were never going to match at $300).

so yeah- for a guy who was always going to wait a year or two (because i need solid 1st party output, can't be bothered with inventory headaches and don't have a tech-lust to be sated)- i know what i'm in for, and it looks an awful lot like this gen: $400 i'll drop for when the 1st party shows up. seems ok with me.

@hatking: PS4 wasn’t ps3 bc tho. They went out of their way to give ppl those.

@liquiddragon: You're right. I hope they come through on the digital stuff. And I hope they go above and beyond. Damn it I just want to play Tokyo Jungle without hooking up my PS3.

Yeah...I have to agree. Up until this point, I felt that Sony was winning the battle of messaging to a certain degree. But, after Microsoft announced the pricing...I don't know what happened.

I think Sony very much undercut it's own messaging, the same one they've been building and building upon, with the strange announcement that the two biggest games they'd have in the launch window (Spidey and Horizon) aren't PS5 exclusives, but will be on PS4 as well.

It very much drops a brick on the notion that these games NEED to be on the upcoming consoles.

And then the pre-ordering chaos that's been bubbling for a while kinda hit last night with the madness over finding a place to pre-order. I think from the jump, Sony gathering people's email and PSN ID's as some kind of lottery to be able to pre-order seemed to confuse way more people than it should have. And right now, even though everyone was assured that there'd be enough in stock to order...you've got a least a thousand units already being flipped on Ebay (and this is just all pre-orders).

I don't know, the winds can change suddenly and maybe I'm just looking at it from my own strange perspective here. But, it definitely feels like Sony's lost the reigns on the overall message they've been trying to convey to consumers, and it's gotten away from them right now. Whereas I get the sense that Microsoft is in a better place than they were, say, three or four months ago.

With that said, too. I think both of them are very much, struggling with the biggest question and the biggest aspect of messaging for both these consoles. Which is, why do you need to buy one this Holiday season? Both Sony and Microsoft cannot seem to make that pitch and convey as to why we should.

@firecracker22: the pricing on miles morales is most suspect. $50? What is your messaging there. When you beat the game by Christmas afternoon and there’s a big “to be continued..” slapped at the end of a 6 hour game don’t be surprised.

I stand corrected on the 99% of based PS4 games working. Is that digital too? With a fee? But please preorder.

I honestly hope both systems do well, there is room for both to do their own thing and be fine. Sony wants to do hardware and stay a traditional game company, build PS5 games that work on PS5; and then Microsoft wants to get into services and subscriptions, push the envelope on streaming, and get stealth get Game Pass onto every PC and system possible. I wouldn't be shocked to see MS slowly pivot from hardware to just cloud infrastructure (Azure, etc.) so you can play your games on any platform (and I suspect they would love it on PS5).

Now what happens 5 years from now? Covid only knows what the world is going to look like then...

They announced months ago that it's going to be a "shorter game," so no one should be surprised.

I just don't really care enough about the games, i don't know if it's because i've become jaded with age, or it's because i don't really care about graphics, or both...
If i had the console i would play the games of course, but Spiderman is more Spiderman + hip hop, Demon Souls is Demon Souls and might eventually come to PC but i've still got a hundred souls-like games to play, FF16's probably going to have dodgy combat unless Square finally figure out how to make an action game, and is coming to PC, and i'm not into RE8.
The game i'm most interested in is Soulstorm, looks like fun, also, PC.

The entire event unsold me on next gen, at least for several years.

It really seems like old, arrogant, PS3 era Sony is back in full force. They have the gall to tell us that the PS5 can only use a Dualshock 5 because games are built from the ground up to take advantage of those features (that won't affect how you play 90% of games), and then it turns out most of their games are cross gen anyway? That controller stuff was always bullshit, but especially so now. Add to that the extremely high price of the console anywhere but the US, and the increase in game prices, and really they aren't giving me a reason to get a PS5.

I just don't really have faith in that ecosystem if this is how they're going to handle things. I have more faith in the microsoft ecosystem, but then, they don't really have any games.

Really the winner out of all of this looking like Nvidia. Sure PC has always been the better option, while consoles are more convenient, but honestly, the price difference has closed enough with next gen that it's not as big a deal, and the exclusives just aren't there yet.

I was going into this thinking "I'll probably get a PS5 next year, after the launch window is over" and now I'm thinking I might not get one at all.

@igort: yeah but $50 and $60 is less of a gap between $50 and new standard $70. Where’s my slide rule so I can calculate the number of QTEs I get per MTX

@fourthline: Shouldn't be able to calculate that when Spiderman didn't feature microtransactions neither.

There's a whole bunch of jaded buzzkills in this thread, do you people not like video games?

A lot of the complaints you listed sound pretty nit picky to me.

Games have released on older platforms when hitting near the launch window of a new console before. It's not like Sony is committing a new cardinal sin here. It's actually a good thing considering a lot of people probably aren't in a great position to buy new consoles right now. Being able to stick with the old ones for a year or so is fine. Sony has a large ps4 install base. It would be a bad decision to kick that to the side this year as I can bet nowhere near that many people are thinking about buying a new console in 2020.

Similarly, game pricing is going up in general and you can bet that Sony won't be the only ones charging $70 for remakes and remasters. You don't have to buy it if you don't want to, but you can bet Nintendo or Microsoft would do so as well. Only difference is Microsoft has gamepass, but you can't expect Sony to lower the pricing on all their games just because you can point and say "but gamepass for $15". Gamepass is a great deal. Definitely use it.

Coming to PC is a positive thing ultimately. We should want sony to actually play ball with their console exclusives. People complained this entire generation that they weren't doing that enough compared to Microsoft. And at the very least the FF trailer labeled it as a console exclusive which implies PC is not excluded.

Agreed on the preorders though. Weird situation and a lot of people are probably going to miss this first wave at least. It's weird times in general, though, and everything feels rushed considering both companies waited so long to get this ball rolling.

Does anyone know how the Miles Morales upgrade will work if you want the PS5 version of Spider-Man?

My understanding is that there's a Deluxe version of Miles Morales to buy on PS5 that brings the PS5 version of the last Spider-Man game, but then I'm seeing that if you purchase MM for PS4 you'll get a free upgrade to the PS5 version?

So...does that mean an upgrade for Spider-Man also...? I'm guessing that'd be a separate purchase all together...but then again, I didn't know they'd be bringing the last Spidey game to PS5, either.

Only real issue here was the preorder stuff. Seems like a really bad miscommunication between Sony and retailer’s.

@firecracker22 said:

I've only seen the Spider-Man remaster mentioned as part of the Ultimate Edition, which makes me think it'll only be available as part of that package. Even if they did (unsurprisingly) decide to sell it standalone later, it's probably been long enough since the PS4 version's release that they probably wouldn't offer the same free upgrade option as with Miles Morales or Horizon: FW.

The parts I found strange were the cross-gen launch titles and the fact that the price & release details felt like last-minute additions.

This was a major announcement (presumably) months in the making. Why were clarifications and corrections going up on Twitter immediately afterwards? It doesn't matter in the long run, but it made the whole thing seem rushed.

Beyond that, Sony's talk about "believing in generations" earlier this year suggested they were focused on launch games squeezing so much next-gen performance out of the PS5 they couldn't run anywhere else. I liked how that contrasted Microsoft's strategy.

Now it seems both are launching with similar prices, more FLOPS, backwards compatibility, fast storage, ray tracing, and cross-gen software that may not capitalize much on those last two features.

The only thing the seems potentially revolutionary about next-gen is Microsoft's focus on services and streaming. I was kinda hoping Sony would prove me wrong.

@serryl: With Xcloud (Bakalar said on the beastcast how they wont leverage that on console.. phftt) there's enough there to get me to drop my iPhone and actually get an Android phone (where feature parity is the same as consoles on phones.. so it's all about features). I don't play any games on my phone but if i can get access to an old 360 game and play it on airplane wifi then that's the future of gaming. People hungry for sony exclusives confuse me. If netflix no longer added content there is still enough stuff to watch for years. New is just new.

The event was a little underwhelming for me because I just wanted to see new titles - I don't really need to see gameplay of games you've already unveiled, I'm here to be sold on the system. That said, the price was the big factor and with it coming in the same as the Xbox I feel pretty comfortable saying that PS5 will be where I'll end up.

In all honestly the price difference would have had to be pretty huge to sway me, because I have a PC and can get my game pass value there. PS5 will be where I play most multiplayer stuff (because I have friends who will likely stick in the PS ecosystem) and their exclusives - sure, maybe Demon's Souls will eventually make it to PC, that seems likely, but I'd rather not wait two years to find out if it does.

I do also think their messaging was badly-handled and a little clunky. I was fully prepared going in to be like, "they already had this presentation ready to go and were just waiting for MS to blink first" - but having seen how it went down, maybe they did pull it all together last-minute. I also get why people are up in arms over the cross-gen games thing, but I think it's fine: it's a pro-consumer move for the early things and doesn't commit them to future titles following suit.

I don't understand why people are just shrugging at Sony's messaging on the preorders and blaming the retailers. It's called a contract. Sony has a complete monopoly on an extremely high demand product. They therefore have 100% of the negotiating leverage to force any and all retailers to contractually agree not to allow preorders on their product until a specific date and time. They either (a) didn't bother to get this into their contracts, or (b) now have the ability to sue each of the retailers for breach of contract. My bet is the former.

Note: I say this as an attorney who negotiates contracts for a living. From Sony's perspective, if they got it in the contract and the retailers breached the date, they'd likely have a problem proving the amount of reputational damages resulting from breach, so I would have recommended including a liquidated damages provision.

@zoofame: I'm hesitant on both consoles at this point. The industry is going to be healthy without me. This close to launch i want to see the system running what are my benefits if i'm playing PUBG? I want to see games loading with progress bars for current gen vs next gen. I want a boring powerpoint from each company because I'll admit im super anti-Playstation but a proper powerpoint and spreadsheet can inform my decision making more than some stupid sizzle reel. I am a reasonable person.

Such a stark difference between the Apple Watch and iPad event the day before where I knew what I was getting and that the new iPad and Apple Watch weren’t for me. I knew what their features are and there’s no confusion. I guess they know gamers will accept anything.

People have a way of learning nothing from history.

@toughshed: Demon’s Souls is owned outright by Sony, the disclaimer said it would come to “PC and other consoles” which, even if they pulled a Horizon and put it on PC a few years down the road, feels false because it will definitely not hit “other consoles” (xbox being the only one that could run it). Also there was an asterisk on the disclaimer but no corresponding one on the “console exlcusive” text, which really screams mistake to me.

Now FF16, that’s a weird one.

Oh, yeah I agree. I think it's been enough time that they don't have to offer the free upgrade for Spider-Man.

The only thing is, I would hope that they'll offer some kind of path for what I suspect might be alot of owners that will probably get Miles Morales for PS4, and would like to play both Spider-Man and Miles Morales on PS5 at some point without having to re-purchase Spider-Man at full price.

Though, I guess at this point the game is going for $20 on PS4...so I don't even know how that'd work for charging for what they're calling a remaster (which the idea that we're already going to be calling PS4 games getting remastered is nuts to me).

Jeez, the changing into new generation hardware can be so damn tricky.

@zoofame

@fourthline:

But i thought you didn't like Cerny's powerpoint presentation? Guy revealed how the new system impacts loads, patches, file-size, game structure, various raytracing applications and makes use of audio profiles.

All in front of a live studio audience.

@bwheeeler: Remember, MS is much more interested in you getting gamepass than thier console (and man is it good on PC).

@shagge: You 100% don't need either of these. Get Cyberpunk and play it for half a year till summer 2021 when these consoles finally show why you should buy either of them.

Sony has had some really sloppy communication this year and this show was no different. Don't get me wrong the games and price announcement itself were all good news, but how everything has been presented and communicated has been a mess.

Okay, some people really don't like powerpoint presentations despite thinking they would like that i guess.

I'm not trying to befriend you, i'm pointing you towards the powerpoint presentation that you were asking for.

@fourthline: In case no one has ever told you, which I cannot possibly imagine, I'm gonna go ahead and let you know; you sound like a tremendously pretentious asshole.

I'm kinda surprised everyone is so hung up on the "lack of launch games" for both of these consoles. In previous console generations it mattered because you had to start from scratch, but that's simply not the case this time. To me these consoles feel like the next round of One X / PS4 Pro type upgrades with some extra bells on top - all my existing games (or near as dammit) will work on the new machines. Why do I need a reason to buy a new console other than "my games will run better"? Seems to work for NVidia and Intel every year.

Exactly. As fun as it is to join the zeitgeist right as it starts, the 360/PS3 era taught me the value of waiting for the dust to clear, haha. I don't expect to need a full hardware revision's wait as would have behooved me for the 360, but hardware issues do happen. But yeah, 500 can get me some desperately needed PC upgrades, so that comes first before game reqs increase too much.

@tp0p: I agree. They did but they didn’t.

First off I totally didn’t expect them to match Microsoft’s $499 price. Sony are extremely arrogant. I really believed they were going to try $599 or even higher. And justify it by saying “we are Sony and already know you will buy this”. Maybe Nvidia put Sony and Microsoft in their places with their series 30xx prices and power telling them. “Your consoles are not worth as much as you think they do”

The $400 disc less version was the biggest surprise of them all. Yeah I get the series S is only $300, but it’s a gimped version of the series X. In 2020 where consoles are already lagging so far behind pc. This is going to be completely unappealing to a lot of gamers. If I was exclusively a console gamer I’d be getting the $400 ps5 without a 2nd thought.

The best part of the conference is yet to come.

Seeing “Console exclusive to ps5. *Also available on PC” on nearly every game they showed made me so fucking happy.

Completely justified my decision to not buy either console on launch. By now you can probably tell I prefer PC over consoles but I’ve always bought the Sony consoles as well as to not miss out on playing some of the great single player exclusives to their platform.

I’m really digging this shift from both Sony and Microsoft releasing their best games on PC too. I can’t count the amount of times during the ps4 generation I was genuinely upset I had to play awesome games like blood borne, death stranding, last of us 2 in low resolution and gfx quality with poor performance while my pc was sitting on the side with its 2080ti begging to be used. Screaming “I can do the 10 times better :(“ “I know:( I’m sorry babe I’d rather be with you too”. Like can you imagine tlou2 which is already gorgeous at 1440p or 4K with ray tracing at over 100fps. Instead I had to play it on a retro console feelsbadman

Overall after seeing demon souls remake, resident evil 8 and final fantasy 16 and seeing they are all coming to pc made me very happy and this was by far the best presentation shown this year. Props to Sony they actually killed it.

My whole perspective on this generation of consoles is that it's probably the weirdest one I've seen in my 30 odd years of playing video games.

First off we have graphics which have seen shorter leaps since we hit the 360/PS3 era. Which I suppose is inevitable. Long gone are the "Whoa those graphics are unbelievable" presentations and now we're more in the realm of "That lighting sure looks nice"

Some of it is personal taste though, I'm sure. Much like some people simply can't bear a game at 30 fps I am generally pretty happy running things in 1440. Games look nice and they're looking nicer by a little bit, so sure.

The craziest bit for me is what these consoles are offering and it's just been very unusual this go-around. In terms of pure bang for your buck Microsoft has really just gone full nuclear option on their approach. They have a budget version of their next gen box for folks who don't mind a lower resolution (and hopefully not many more drawbacks... We'll see I suppose...) and they have a subscription service that promises all of their first party releases for "free". It's a killer proposition. But they're also going hard on PC equivalency for releases... And Game Pass.So for folks that are already doing PC gaming the draw to buying an Xbox seems a little murkier. Though all told if you don't already have a $1200 rig that you've been maintaining for the past several years the $500 Xbox is probably a pretty good deal if you just want to play those games.

Sony (and Nintendo when they get around to it) are mostly sticking to the classic "If you want to play these games you have to get our console" strategy and that all largely boils down to what kind of games you like. I remember debating whether to buy an Xbox One or PS4 when the opportunity came up and I knew I would have little to do except play video games and lie still while bones knitted themselves back together. There was very definitely a different color to both of them. Xbox had the racing games and the shooters. PS4 had the RPGs and the third person adventure games. Everything else was kind of a shared library and unlike the PS3/360 generation ports seemed to be fairly equivalent to one another.

It feels like that has continued to be the pitch to this day... Except now a lot of people already have a Series X in their homes or something relatively equivalent.

That's not even getting into how we're deep in the digital distribution generation now as well so there's that angle to consider. Did you buy 150 games on your Xbox One? Chances are that if you can only pick one you're gonna get the Xbox.

As for myself what am I going to get? I'm definitely getting a PS5 and whatever Nintendo comes up with next. I might get an Xbox SX just because I personally find the focused nature of a console experience more pleasant than a gaming PC but honestly if Microsoft's service push gets any better I might just get a new video card in the next few years and do that instead.

As for the pre-order debacle for the PS5 I'm going to be very curious to hear about today's direct-from-Sony pre-order people.

I, like several others, was surprised and a bit disappointed at the mess that came about almost immediately after Sony's presentation. I didn't go in with high expectations honestly. With the way things have been this year I wasn't really expecting a chance even if retailers had waited to open pre-orders instead of saying "Nah we're not gonna make you wait." I even made a token lazy attempt to get one from Best Buy but the site was half broken for the entire half hour or so I tried for it.

But I also happened to be one of the folks that got an email from Sony saying "Hey this isn't a guarantee or nothing but click this link on Friday morning and we'll get you a PS5". So I did it. I woke up today and got on my computer a little before 10 am and clicked in. Waited on a page for about five minutes, was directed to enter shipping and payment details and got a receipt. That was it.

There's a very good chance I got very lucky and everything burst into flames moments after I got my confirmation, but it was a damn sight better than mashing F5 waiting for GameStop to come back online.

This is not me making any sort of critical judgment calls on the viability of different retail storefronts or anything. Just me making observations to what I've seen and experienced. It all just contributes to the underlying theme of this post: Shit's weird, man.

I would love to hear about folks what did the Sony invitational PS5 pre-order thing. I wonder how many of us there were and was everyone else's process as quick and smooth as mine?

Unfortuantely, I wasn't so lucky. I got the email for the personal invite. Everything seem to go fine until I got to the checkout. It kept rejecting my payment card, even though it is the same one I use to make purchases from the PS Store for years. It wouldn't accept the security number for some reason even though its valid.

Updated: Discovered the problem. Had to settle for the Digital Version instead. Bummer, but I'm still excited. Depending on how things go, I might get the Disc Version years from now. But by then physical media might be a thing of the past.

I just need one of those side-by-side comparison videos showing PS5, Series X, and the Series S. Ofc that's going to be tough to showcase. This feels like the foggiest launch ever, I have no idea what ot expect in terms of the average game pushing resolution > fps or will we see options on every game? Raytracing + 60 fps + 1080p is fine for me, but 1440p at 120 hz with 2D games sounds great too. It feels like every game is going to be vastly different from another.

@prolurker: I’m sure Digital Foundry will have you covered closer to launch, but if you’re the type to care about which console looks better than the others, it’s a fair bet you’re in the market for a Series X or PS5 rather than a Series S.