Sony had an event today and as expected, it introduced the PlayStation 4. The next-gen platform is designed to shift focus from the living room to the gamer, Sony said, and overall, PlayStation’s approach is meant to make it possible for gamers to play wherever they want, whenever they want.
PS4 lead system architect Mark Cerny talked about how the evolution of the PS4 came about, saying it began five years ago, earlier on in the life of the PS3. The PS3 was a first step, which was designed to connect to a variety of services, but it was limited because of how early it launched in that world, Cerny said.
“Much less value is found today in blast processing or a system-on-a-chip,” Cerny said. He suggested tech could interfere with design innovation. The tech remains important, he stressed, but the idea was to create a platform that was all about experience. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s a tune Apple and Steve Jobs started playing years ago when they realized the spec race was a nonstarter in the mobile phone world.
“By game creators, for game creators. It is a powerful and accessible system,” Cerny said on stage, suggesting that this time around there was a strong emphasis on ease of development, hence the use of a standard x86 PC CPU. The GPU is designed for use with “practical tasks,” he said, with the overall goal of making development a painless experience.
Essentially, the PS4 is an advanced, x86-based personal computer, which means that it should be easy for developers to build. All of this is clearly an answer to a major complaint from studios about the previous generation, which was infamously tricky to master from a software perspective.
Sony also unveiled a redesigned DualShock 4 controller, which has the Vita-style touchpad depicted in rumors, ad works with a 3D “stereo” camera accessory to track its movements in a loose approximation of what’s possible with Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect.
The hardware is clearly also borrowing some tricks from mobile games. It has save states that allow users to quickly freeze and resume gameplay, without having to save just by switching on and off the console. There’s also background downloading, which allows digital titles to be played before they’re even completely on your local drive.
Social is another key tentpole for the PS4, according to Cerny. He described a new function that allows you to quickly pause and upload gameplay videos as easily as you might have done with static screenshots in the past. There’s also spectator functionality for watching “celebrities” gaming, something which seems to have been borrowed from Twitter’s success with famous members. Networking will also be based around real names and profile pictures, instead of strictly on gamer tags and avatars, too, and all of this will plug into mobile apps to help gamers stay in touch.
We had a hint or two about its imminent arrival, but Sony’s now made its next-generation DualShock 4 controller official at tonight’s PlayStation 4 event in NYC. The company’s Mark Cerny took to the stage to reveal the all-new companion, which has been redesigned and now features a more rounded form factor as well as what appears to be a slightly rubberized grip with “enhanced rumble capabilities.” There’s also a touchpad now (clearly taking a cue from the Vita), a headphone jack, the long-rumored share button, a light bar that, according to Cerny, will be utilized as a “more friendly way to identify players” and a stereo camera which is used to track the 3D position of the Move-compatible controller.
Not surprisingly, Sony’s touting the addition of the “Share” button as one of the biggest features of the DualShock 4, allowing players to easily send tidbits like video clips and screenshots to social sites such as Ustream, Facebook and, naturally, friends on the PlayStation Network. That’s all we know so far, but we‘re sure to hear more about the DualShock 4 as the night progresses — in the meantime, enjoy the gallery bellow and stay tuned to this post as we’ll be adding more details as they come in.
Check out our liveblog of Sony’s event to get the latest news as it happens!
We’re live from the Sony PlayStation event here in New York City, and the company has just announced and confirmed the PlayStation 4. Sony says that they believe that the PlayStation 4 “represents a significant shift from thinking of PlayStation as merely a box or console.” Sony is looking to turn the PlayStation ecosystem into more than just a gaming console.
Sony hasn’t unveiled what the console looks like just yet, but they at least showed off the logo, as seen above. The company is looking to move forward with the way the gamers play games, and they’re looking forward to changing the way gamers interact with the gaming console and accessing games. Sony says that the PS4 will have 8GB of GDDR5 RAM and an 8-core x86 processor.
While Sony hasn’t shown off the look of the new console, they unveiled the DualShock 4 controller, which is right on with the few rumors that we’ve heard about just recently. It has the small touchpad that we’ve seen, and the overall shape is very reminiscent of past DualShock controllers.
The company is wanting to make it easy for gamers to access everything that Sony offers, including content available on the PlayStation network. Sony is on stage talking about how they’re changing the way they deliver content to gamers in the living room. It seems they’re going to take their sweet time, though, saying that “over the next few hours” they’ll be talking about the new console.
This week a PlayStation event was held by Sony surrounding what was expected to be a reveal of the PlayStation 4, but it began with a big wider an aim. Speaking about the gaming world at large, Sony’s own Andrew House spoke up: “The living room is no longer the center of the PlayStation universe, the gamer is.” The next-generation gamer is the first subject of concern here in 2013, and thus far there’s been no clue that a new console is up for play today.
Continuing to speak about expansions of “The Future of Play” and ease of access with products like the PS Vita, House made it clear that the gamer was the center of this universe. For those of you wondering what the PlayStation 4 could be anyway, have a peek at the timeline provided below, one we whipped up earlier today in anticipation of this event.
Also note that House stands in front of a screen that’s shaped like a rectangle, leading forums to explode this evening with talk of a PlayStation Tablet. This can be substantiated by the PlayStation EyePad note from earlier this week as well. PlayStation is about to expand in one way or another – you’ll have to keep up with the SlashGear main news feed to check it out!
It looks like the rumors and speculations were right on the money as Sony has announced the PlayStation 4 at their event today which was held in New York. The PlayStation 4 will feature a “supercharged” PC architecture, X86 CPU, 8GB of unified memory and a local storage HDD.
Comcast is mimicking the mobile industry and has just started testing its own pre-paid service. The company has launched its pre-paid XFINITY internet service in a few states, including Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This new program is aimed for people who hate contracts, and/or do not have sufficient credit to sign up for Comcast’s internet service. This service will be available for new activations only, meaning those of you who already have Comcast’s services will be left out.
There are a few caveats that may deter many of you from Comcast’s pre-paid internet service. The first caveat is the $69.95 starter kit that you are required to purchase from your local retailer, whether it’d be Target, Radio Shack, T-Mobile(?), or many others. The starter kit comes with a 30-day service card/activation code, and all the cables you need to get started.
The second caveat is the slow data speeds allotted for pre-paid subscribers. Users will only get 3 Mbps download speeds and 768k upload speeds. While that may be adequate for casual Google searchers, that’s certainly not enough for everyone else. Even Comcast’s lowest tiered contract plan offers at least 6 Mbps download speeds.
So while this may be good enough for the average consumer, it’s pretty terrible for most of us. Watching Netflix movies, playing online games, and even watching YouTube videos can be a less-than-pleasant experience with these speeds. I, personally, need at least 20Mbps download speeds (I’m currently using 30Mbps) to feel satisfied when downloading my videos and playing my games. What data speeds do you need to be satisfied? What service do you use?
It’s been seven years since the giant, boxy, expensive, hugely-fun and hyped PS3 first arrived. Seven years is a long time. But the next expensive, gorgeous era of gaming is here: the PlayStation 4. Everything looks better, yes, but it’s definitely more of the same. More »
Sony tonight announced its much-rumored next video game console, the PlayStation 4. Sony Computer Entertainment prez and CEO Andrew House announced the console with little more than a logo and a handful of concepts, though he did say it’s coming in holiday 2013. We’re sure to hear more as the night goes on, and we’ll be updating this post as we learn more.
Lead system architect Mark Cerny — legendary game dev and, to us, creator of Marble Madness — came up next. He said that development of the PS4 started five years ago. Cerny said he’s been exploring how to evolve “the PlayStation ecosystem,” and he started by speaking to the limitations of PlayStation 3. Cerny said he’s been aiming to make sure “nothing gets between the platform and the game.” An image of an old-timey hunter shooting space invaders in the sky is used as an example — here’s hoping the PS4 doesn’t mean we’ll be taking plastic guns and shooting pixels in the sky.
“We were able to create in PlayStation 4 a system by game creators, for game creators,” Cerny said. As far as specs, he said it runs on x86 architecture, a “highly enhanced” PC GPU (with “almost 2 teraflops of performance,” he added), an unknown amount of local HDD storage, and 8GB of GDDR5 system memory. Cerny next unveiled the DualShock 4, which looks an awful lot like the leaks we saw recently — it features a touchpad, a light bar, and what looks like rubberized grips. Otherwise, it looks an awful lot like a DualShock 3 with some new bells and whistles.
Sony tonight announced its much-rumored next video game console, the PlayStation 4. Sony Computer Entertainment prez and CEO Andrew House announced the console with little more than a logo and a handful of concepts. We’re sure to hear more as the night goes on, and we’ll be updating this post as we learn more.
Lead system architect Mark Cerny — legendary game dev and, to us, creator of Marble Madness — came up next. He said that development of the PS4 started five years ago. Cerny said he’s been exploring how to evolve “the PlayStation ecosystem,” and he started by speaking to the limitations of PlayStation 3. Cerny said he’s been aiming to make sure “nothing gets between the platform and the game.” An image of an old-timey hunter shooting space invaders in the sky is used as an example — here’s hoping the PS4 doesn’t mean we’ll be taking plastic guns and shooting pixels in the sky.
“We were able to create in PlayStation 4 a system by game creators, for game creators,” Cerny said. As far as specs, he said it runs on x86 architecture, a “highly enhanced” PC GPU (with “almost 2 teraflops of performance,” he added), an unknown amount of local HDD storage, and 8GB of GDDR5 system memory. Cerny next unveiled the DualShock 4, which looks an awful lot like the leaks we saw recently — it features a touchpad, a light bar, and what looks like rubberized grips. Otherwise, it looks an awful lot like a DualShock 3 with some new bells and whistles.
Cerny’s talking software now — the PS4 can pause and resume mid-game, allowing players to multitask at any point. There’s also a second chip dedicated to managing uploads and downloads, meaning you can download games in the background or when the system’s off. More importantly, however, you can start downloading a game and begin playing it as the download goes — pretty great! As far as sharing goes, PS4 is heavy on social interactivity; Cerny said its social network will extend beyond the console to mobile and Vita. He’s ambiguous about which platforms that’ll mean, but it sounds like Sony’s aiming to make it platform agnostic. There’s also a Pinterest-esque social app for friends to share screens and video, which Cerny said applies to the PS4’s “personalization” angle. “You’ll see real pictures of your real friends,” he said.
David Perry went next, and he talked about Sony’s acquisition of Gaikai (he was the former head of Gaikai, but now he’s working with Sony). His game streaming service is being employed to run demos on PS4, allowing people to try any game they want instantly. He also said that both Facebook and Ustream are being employed on PS4, using the DualShock 4’s Share button. But how much? He didn’t say. Beyond just sharing games you’ve already played, you can also livestream — to the point that a friend of yours who is spectating can actually jump into your game, via streaming, and help you out.
But wait, there’s more! Despite Remote Play being a function in the previous PlayStation console, Perry said it’s also heading to PlayStation 4. A brief demo of Mark Cerny’s PS4 game Knack was shown — Perry said latency should be imperceptible, using Gaikai’s streaming tech. Perry gave one last tease: “everything everywhere.” He’s hoping that PlayStation Cloud will apply to more than just PS4 and Vita, but also to mobile devices as well. The service will roll out “in phases,” Perry said, without giving more detail, though he did say that Cloud will power PS1, PS2, PS3, and PlayStation Mobile games.
Check out our liveblog of Sony’s event to get the latest news as it happens!
After months of anticipation, Sony today announced their next-generation PlayStation console, the PS4. Despite showing off the controller (which we’ve already seen,) Sony continues to be evasive about showing off the console itself, or discussing pricing. We’re guessing they’re saving that for E3 this Summer.
Kicking off the presentation with the tagline “Playstation Wants to Win the War Against Reality,” Sony wowed a massive crowd gathered in New York and on the web to see the reveal of the new console with an epic, 2+ hour stage presentation.
The PlayStation 4 is a completely revamped gaming system and ecosystem, running on a “simplified and streamlined” platform, designed for ease of development while providing a tremendous amount of technical power. PS4 Lead System Architect Mark Cerny – producer behind Marble Madness, Crash Bandicoot,Sonic the Hedghog 2 and designer on numerous other popular games showed off the new platform’s architecture, which has more in common with high-end gaming PCs than previous consoles.
Similar to PC architecture, the PlayStation 4 will run on a high-end X86-based CPU, with a “highly-enhanced” PC GPU, and 8GB unified GDDR5 RAM, with 176GBps bandwidth. The system will have a powerful 8-core 64-bit AMD CPU and its 1.84 TFLOP Radeon GPU will reside on the same die to enhance performance. In addition, the system will use a hard drive to provide ample storage capacity. It will also sport a 6X speed Blu-ray drive, as well as USB 3.0. Here’s a quick spec chart, courtesy of Sony:
To give you an idea of just how powerful the new hardware is, here’s a face rendered using Quantic Dream’s incredible facial animation and shading technologies, running on preliminary PS4 hardware. While the still image is impressive, it’s even more incredible in motion. Could we finally be at the point where console graphics are as good as what you can see in the movies? Probably not, but I’m still excited to see the final hardware in action.
The new DualShock 4 controller is exactly as we saw a few days ago, offering improved analog sticks, enhanced rumble, lower latency, a headphone jack, a small touchpad, player color illumination, and a “Share” button for instantaneous sharing of gameplay videos and other content.
In addition, the system will come with a stereo depth camera that can detect the position of controllers from across the room.
Perhaps one of the coolest features Sony revealed was the ability to suspend and immediately resume games in RAM. The PS4 hardware even has a specialized background processing chip for uploads/downloads.
In addition to background downloads, this will enable you to start playing newly-installed games as they are are being downloaded, so you won’t have to wait for massive downloads to complete before you can play. Though I doubt every PS4 title will support this technology. The new PS4 user interface seems very clean and easy to use, almost like the Microsoft Windows 8 “Metro” interface. Maybe it’s just the blue background and the fonts, but it seems very similar to me. An odd choice coming from one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors.
To support sharing and social interaction, the PS4 will have a dedicated “always-on” video compression and decompression technology, which will enable instantaneous sharing and spectating of video content directly within games. Plus the console will offer a new “Friends” interface based on real-world friends, with less emphasis on avatars, likely to incorporate relationships from existing social networks (I’m assuming there will be Facebook integration of some sort.)
Sony continued to drive home the idea that the PlayStation ecosystem will be less about being tied to your couch, and player-centered. With that in mind, they will offer companion apps for tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices, as well as an improved Remote Play capability on PS Vita. According to Sony Gaikai CEO David Perry, “Our longterm goal is to make every PS4 game playable on PS Vita using local Wi-fi.”
Gaikai’s PlayStation Cloud gaming solution will also play a big part of the PS4 experience providing features like an instant free trials of games, and also involved in some way with real-time spectating of your friend’s gameplay. You can even allow other players to take over your controller remotely to help you get through a difficult part of a game.
Unfortunately, Perry also let slip that PS4 hardware won’t support backwards compatibility with PS3 games. Boo! Hiss.
I’m guessing this is to keep the complexity and cost of the system down, but I don’t want to have to keep my old PS3 around in order to play my collection of current-gen games. That said, Sony is looking at ways to play old games from the PS1, PS2 and PS3 via the Gaikai cloud platform, which will roll out in phases over time.
While Sony steered clear of showing actual PS4 hardware, they did introduced a number of new game titles, and showed PS4 demo footage of many of them. Here are a few of the titles coming to the PlayStation 4:
Knack – an action platformer produced by Mark Cerny, the Systems Architect behind the PS4. It wasn’t really clear from the demo what the gameplay will be like, but if anyone is going to get the most out of the PS4 hardware, you’d think it was its own architect.
KillZone: Shadowfall – an incredible looking new FPS from Guerilla Games, with graphics and physics better than anything I’ve seen. One can only hope the final game looks as good as these in-game screens:
DriveClub – a new racer from Evolution Studios, focused on team-based racing. The game will feature asyncronous and real-time group play, and will work with a companion DriveClub app on mobile devices, which will allow you to initiate challenges and view stats. The game is all about an immersive first-person driving experience, and the brief demo footage didn’t disappoint.
The game will feature insanely detailed cars, every element of which are based on real-world parts and physics. Just check out the detail on this carbon fiber:
inFamous: Second Son – Developed by Sucker Punch, the PS4 exclusive game is a sequel of sorts to the popular franchise, featuring an Orwellian future in which police monitor everything, and people with superhuman powers roam the streets.
The Witness – a cool looking exploration/puzzle game from Jonathan Blow, Creator of Braid. Its challenging puzzles are designed to guide you deftly ”from confusion to understanding.” The game will first arrive on PS4 before it hits other platforms.
Media Molecule, creator of LittleBigPlanet demoed their “record your dreams” concept. By combining the PlayStation Move controller with PS4′s powerful hardware, they were able to sculpt items in 3D space with ease. These objects can then be combined to build larger sets and game levels. This wasn’t from a specific game, but still showed off some impressive interactions. I can see this showing up in the next LittleBigPlanet or a similar world-building adventure.
In addition to first-party and indie studios, Capcom showed off its new PS4-specific gaming engine, codenamed “Panta Rhei”, along with its first title, tentatively titled Deep Down.
Square Enix is also on board for the PS4, and showed off its “target quality” for the new platform using its new “Luminous” engine. Though it showed no specific games, only describing the PS4 as “a game developer’s dream,” and mentioned that an as yet unnamed Final Fantasy title was in the works.
UbiSoft showed off real-time gameplay from its hotly-anticipated Watch Dogs running on PS4 dev hardware. We’ve already seen earlier demo footage, but in case you’ve missed it, here it is again:
PC developer Blizzard Entertainment announced a strategic partnership with Sony to launch games on both the PS3 and PS4, with a console version of Diablo III currently under development. Activision is committed as well, and confirmed that Bungie’s epic new FPS Destiny will be released on the PS4 (and the PS3).
It’s clear that Sony means business with the PS4, launching not only a completely new hardware architecture, based on high-end PC gaming, but a variety of new IP and game titles to take full advantage of the enhanced hardware.
While it wasn’t actually part of the festivities, Sony revealed that the PlayStation 4 is expected to hit stores for the “2013 holiday season” on the very last slide they presented. Now that they’ve whet our appetites, I want to see the actual hardware, and find out the pricing and final release date.
Your move, Microsoft. Time to show us what you’ve got up your sleeves with the Xbox 720 – or whatever it’s called.
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It looks like the rumors and speculations were right on the money as Sony has announced the PlayStation 4 at their event today which was held in New York. The PlayStation 4 will feature a “supercharged” PC architecture, X86 CPU, 8GB of unified memory and a local storage HDD.
