Makan Dua Belas

Rabu, 17 April 2019

The PS5 price tag will be "appealing to gamers" says its lead architect... whatever that means - GamesRadar

In a surprise move that seemingly came out of nowhere yesterday, Sony casually announced key details about its next-gen console, the unofficially titled PS5, in a Wired interview with the system's lead architect Mark Cerny.

Throughout the conversation, Cerny confirmed that the PS5 would be backwards compatible, feature ray-tracing technology and 8K resolutions, and reduce loading times to the point of non-existence, but a detail suspiciously omitted from the interview was anything about the potential PS5 price point Sony is aiming for at launch.

However, the story's author Peter Rubin later confirmed on Twitter that he had asked Cerny about the potential cost of the PS5, and his answer was unsurprisingly cryptic. "I believe that we will be able to release it at an SRP [suggested retail price] that will be appealing to gamers in light of its advanced feature set", explained Cerny, before admitting "that's about all I can say about it" when Rubin asked if that meant a more expensive price tag than the PS4.

The newly released information about the PS5's internal tech, which will use AMD chip technology that currently goes on the market for upwards of £350 alone, does indeed suggest it will be a steeper investment for consumers looking to purchase the console on day one, but Cerny's words can be taken as a small assurance that it won't be completely unaffordable for the average gamer.

In other words, don't expect a price tag as ludicrously high as the PlayStation 3's back in 2006, but perhaps we should also be preparing to pay a little more than the consumer-friendly entry fee of the PS4's 2013 RRP. Meanwhile, Microsoft has just revealed its plans for E3 2019, and could be about to announce its own next-gen console, the rumoured Xbox Project Scarlet.

Find out what developers think about the future of gaming in the video below, or head over to our list of the biggest new games of 2019 on the way to see the titles worth keeping an eye on.

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https://www.gamesradar.com/ps5-pricetag-mark-cerny-appealing-to-gamers/

2019-04-17 10:46:00Z
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Verizon's new activation fees cost more in-store, less in-app - Engadget

Verizon has simultaneously slashed and increased its activation and upgrade fees, depending on how you process the transaction. According to CNET and reports posted online, you now only have to pay $20 if you upgrade your device or activate a line on the carrier's website or the My Verizon app. That's down $10 from the previous $30 fee for either service. However, if you walk into a store or call the company's phone line for upgrade or activation, you'll now have to pay $40 instead.

A Verizon spokesperson described personal and over-the-phone transactions to CNET as a "full-service experience," perhaps suggesting that those channels deserve the extra $10. The company is probably hoping to discourage people who can do things on their own from engaging customer service and sales reps, though what the fee adjustments mean for employees remains to be seen. The Redditor who posted the news on the website claimed to work for an indirect store and said employees aren't getting a pay upgrade despite the higher fees. We've reached out to Verizon for confirmation and will update when we hear back.

Verizon owns Engadget's parent company, Verizon Media. Rest assured, Verizon has no control over our coverage. Engadget remains editorially independent.

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/17/verizon-new-activation-fees/

2019-04-17 06:02:46Z
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Verizon's new activation fees cost more in-store, less in-app - Engadget

Verizon owns Engadget's parent company, Verizon Media. Rest assured, Verizon has no control over our coverage. Engadget remains editorially independent.

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/17/verizon-new-activation-fees/

2019-04-17 06:00:45Z
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Selasa, 16 April 2019

Xbox One S All-Digital Edition launches May 7 - Gematsu

Xbox One S All-Digital Edition launches May 7

Includes Minecraft, Forza Horizon 3, and Sea of Thieves.

Xbox One S: All-Digital Edition

Microsoft has announced the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition, a disc-free Xbox One S that includes a one terabyte hard drive and downloads for Minecraft, Forza Horizon 3, and Sea of Thieves. It will launch on May 7 for $249.99 at the Microsoft Store, as well as select retailers worldwide including Walmart, Best Buy and Amazon.com.

Watch the announcement trailer below.

[embedded content]

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https://gematsu.com/2019/04/xbox-one-s-all-digital-edition-launches-may-7

2019-04-16 21:30:00Z
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Why $249 is an unsustainable price for the first all-digital Xbox - arstechnica.com

Enlarge / Microsoft needs to give customers a better deal to convince them to give up discs for good.
Dazzied / Flickr

Today's announcement of the previously rumored "All-Digital Edition" of the Xbox One S is one of the few instances when a redesigned version of a home console is, from a features perspective, strictly worse than the version that came before it. The removal of the disc drive means the All-Digital Edition can't play Blu-rays, DVDs, or old disc-based games you (or GameStop) might have lying around, and it won't let you resell any games you might buy for it. The new box isn't even any smaller, even though the bulky optical drive has been removed.

Microsoft intends to make up for this loss of features with a lower price point for the new unit, which will sell for a $249 MSRP starting May 7. But that suggested price point—while technically lower than the official $299 MSRP for a 1TB Xbox One S bundle—doesn't seem likely to convince many people to invest in the disc-free console future.

An old low price?

To understand why $249 is such an odd MSRP for this new, less-capable Xbox One, we have to look back at the history of Xbox One pricing. After a higher-than-expected $499 launch with a bundled Kinect, the Xbox One saw some relatively rapid price reductions after the 2014 Kinect unbundling. By September 2016, players could already get into the Xbox One ecosystem (with a bundled game) for the low, low price of $249.

Yes, that price was for the bulkier original Xbox One design, and it only included a 500GB hard drive. But that unit, available 32 months ago at $249, plays all the same games as the "All-Digital" Xbox One announced today for the same MSRP. And the old unit can play those games on disc, to boot.

Similar pricing for the redesigned Xbox One S—disc drive and all—has not been hard to find in the past. The 500GB version of the system was available for as low as $249 in Black Friday bundles back in 2016. After the holidays, Microsoft again offered an official 500GB, $249 Xbox One S bundle with Minecraft in March 2017. In summer 2017, you could spend $249 for a 500GB Xbox One S and get a $50 gift card, too. By the end of that year, 500GB systems were going for $189 during Black Friday closeouts.

Sure, the All-Digital Edition has twice the hard drive space as those old deals. But 1TB Xbox One S systems, with disc drives, were being offered at $249 with a bundled game nearly a year ago. And though $299 is the "official" MSRP for a 1TB Xbox One bundle these days, there has been an extended, de facto price drop to $249 at all major retailers (including Microsoft's own stores) since late January.

This is the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition. Sure looks like an existing Xbox One S, doesn't it?

Microsoft
The existing Xbox One S and its new, no-disc sibling. Other than that solid panel where the disc drive slot used to be, they're identical.

Microsoft
New box, seen from the front.

Microsoft
DISC-FREE GAMING. DISC-FREE GAMING. DISC-FREE GAMING.

Microsoft
It appears Microsoft forgot to put the French and Spanish translations on this North American box mock-up. English repeats three times in every slot for some reason.

Microsoft

Unlike a temporary holiday sale, the multiple months that have been spent at the lower $249 price are going to make it hard to convince customers (and retailers) to ever go back to the "actual MSRP" of $299. That becomes even harder when you consider that a 1TB Xbox One system with Battlefield V is currently available for $199 from Walmart or $219 from Amazon.

And yes, the All-Digital Edition comes with three downloadable games rather than the single disc usually bundled with disc-drive-enabled Xbox One S units. But those games—Sea of Thieves, Forza Horizon 3, and Minecraft—are low-priced legacy titles that were released one year, 2.5 years, and 4.5 years ago, respectively. All three digital games are available for free through an Xbox Game Pass subscription, as well. The bundles Microsoft is currently offering for the original Xbox One S, meanwhile, let customers choose from more recent (and higher-priced) hits: The Division 2, Anthem, Fallout 76, Forza Horizon 4, Battlefield V, and NBA 2K19.

The unenforceable MSRP

Historically, console makers have been able to enforce their MSRPs with an iron fist. Companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft would impose "minimum advertised price" requirements on distributors and retailers, then refuse to provide future stock to any stores that dared attempt to undercut the competition.

By officially keeping the full-featured Xbox One S at a $299 MSRP, Microsoft gets to keep its slower-selling hardware in parity with Sony, which has sold 1TB PS4 bundles at that price for a while now. But with the de facto retail price for an Xbox One being lower across the board, things get a bit weird. Yesterday, when I asked my Twitter followers what the MSRP for a 1TB Xbox One S bundle was, almost half of them picked the $249 price. That's not a scientific survey or anything, but it's also not that surprising, considering $249 is the price retailers have been charging for the system for months.

That's a perception problem that Microsoft Platform and Devices GM Jeff Gattis told Ars he was "painfully aware of." But the official pricing of the newer system doesn't show such awareness. For this new hardware to really make an impact, Microsoft should have launched it at a $199 MSRP, trumpeting console hardware that breaks through the $200 barrier (before sales pricing) for the first time this generation. That could have been packaged with an official drop to $249 for the disc-drive version of the Xbox One S, locking in a price that has been the de facto standard at retailers for months now.

As it stands, this kind of below-MSRP pricing is likely what we're going to see happen at retail anyway. Stores that currently sell an Xbox One with a disc drive for $249 can't really get away with selling the same console without a disc drive for the same price. If they do, they'll soon find customers ignoring the All-Digital Edition until the price comes down below Microsoft's unsustainable MSRP.

We've long argued that there's a market for an all-digital console that's priced aggressively compared to the competition. But for that kind of pricing to work, Microsoft has to stop pretending that the 1TB Xbox One S is still a $299 system in practice.

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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/why-249-is-an-unsustainable-price-for-the-first-all-digital-xbox/

2019-04-16 21:10:00Z
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PS5 First Details: Backwards Compatible, PSVR Support, SSDs, And More Specs - GameSpot

Sony has revealed some information about its highly anticipated next-generation PlayStation. In an interview with Wired, Mark Cerny, who was lead system architect for the PlayStation 4 and is currently working on its successor, divulged details on the components that will power the next-gen system and teased some of the breakthroughs it is making.

In the interview, Cerny didn't name the console, though conventional thinking states it will probably be PlayStation 5. The next-gen PlayStation is partially based on PS4 architecture, which means that it is backwards compatible. Cerny also revealed that it is not an all-digital device, and will accept physical discs. Wired's article describes the transition from PS4 to PS5, as indicated by Cerny, as a "gentle one," adding that numerous games will be released for both PS4 and the next-gen console.

Housed in the console will be an AMD chip that has a CPU based on the third-generation Ryzen. It'll have eight cores of the seven-nanometer Zen 2 microchip. Although the console will support 8K, displaying at this resolution will be dependant on TVs catching up.

The graphics, meanwhile, will be driven by a custom version of Radeon's Navi line. This graphics chip will support ray tracing, something which is starting to become popular in movies and video games. Although it is traditionally thought of as a lighting technique, Cerny says that there are implications beyond creating realistic environments.

"If you wanted to run tests to see if the player can hear certain audio sources or if the enemies can hear the players' footsteps, ray tracing is useful for that," he explained. "It's all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment."

In fact, audio is one the main improvements Cerny is keen to talk about. The AMD chip will enable 3D audio, and this, according to Cerny, is key to immersing players deeper. This naturally led to discussions of PlayStation VR, and while Cerny didn't confirm whether a new version of Sony's headset will be released, the existing one will be supported.

"I won't go into the details of our VR strategy ... beyond saying that VR is very important to us and that the current PSVR headset is compatible with the new console," he confirmed.

Another key leap the next PlayStation will make comes through its hard drive. According to Cerny, developers let Sony know that what they want solid-state drives in the new hardware, as opposed to the slower equivalents used in current consoles. These SSDs are relatively prevalent now in laptops, and what Sony is bringing to the next PlayStation is described as being specialized for the hardware.

Cerny demonstrated the change an SSD introduces to gaming by comparing a load sequence from Insomniac's Spider-Man on a standard PS4 Pro and a dev kit of the next-gen PlayStation. On the former, it was around 15 seconds, while on the latter it was 0.8 seconds. This, Cerny added, has implications on how the world can be rendered too, which in turn impacts how quickly Spidey can move through the world. On the new hardware, the camera moves through the city much quicker, as the hardware is capable of keeping up with rendering requirements.

Discussing the SSD, Cerny said "the raw read speed is important, but so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro and then I put in a SSD that cost as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro—it might be one-third faster."

Cerny didn't provide any details on any of the services or a broader overview of PlayStation's vision for the next-generation of gaming, instead focusing on the nitty-gritty of its hardware. It is currently unclear when the console will be fully unveiled. Traditionally, Sony would has debuted its new PlayStations at E3, but the company will not have its usual press conference this year. This leaves PlayStation Experience, one of its new Nintendo Direct-like State of Play streams, or a standalone PS5 announcement event as possibilities--that is assuming it plans to reveal the PlayStation 5 this year.

It is also unclear when Sony plans to launch the PS5. In May 2018, Sony's head of PlayStation, John Kodera, said the new PlayStation was three years off. "We will use the next three years to prepare the next step," he said, "to crouch down so that we can jump higher in the future."

While Sony's plans are still largely unclear, Microsoft's are starting to come into focus. The company is set to have an E3 press conference this year, and head of Xbox Phil Spencer said it is going to go "as big at E3 as we've ever been." In 2018, Microsoft confirmed that a new Xbox was in development, and it is expected that we'll see this next-generation console at E3 2019. More immediately, it has been suggested that an all-digital Xbox One S will be announced soon. As the name indicates, this new console would not accept physical discs and designed around downloading and streaming.

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https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ps5-first-details-specs-backwards-compatible-8k-ps/1100-6466281/

2019-04-16 17:43:00Z
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Sony Details Next-Generation PlayStation Console - News - Anime News Network

Sony Interactive Entertainment's Mark Cerny, PlayStation 4 lead system architect and game designer, spoke with Wired magazine about the "next-gen console" that will be the successor to the PS4. The unnamed console has been in development for four years, and Cerny is again serving as the lead system architect. Cerny stated that the console will not launch in 2019.

Cerny hinted that the new console will allow "for fundamental changes in what a game can be." Multiple studios have been working with the console, and Sony recently accelerated its release of development kits for the console.

The console will feature an AMD chip with a custom unit for 3D audio. The graphics processing unit (GPU) will be custom variant of Radeon's Navi family and support ray tracing. The next-generation console will also have a solid-state drive (SSD) to drastically decrease loading times.

Cerny declined to comment if there will be a next-generation PlayStation VR unit for the new console. However, he said that the current PS VR headset is compatible with the new console.

The console will be backward-compatible with PS4 games, as it is partly based on the PS4's architecture. When the new console launches, Cerny confirmed that many new games will get releases for both the PS4 and new system.

Sony revealed in October that the PS4 has sold more than 86.1 million units worldwide as of September. Sony president Kenichiro Yoshida told Financial Times in October that "it's necessary to have a next-generation hardware." Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO John (Tsuyoshi) Kodera revealed in May 2018 that the PS4 console was entering the "final phase of its life cycle."

The PlayStation 4 console first launched in the U.S. and Canada in November 2013 and in Japan in February 2014. Sony shipped 7.5 million units during fiscal year 2013, 14.8 million in fiscal year 2014, 17.7 million in fiscal year 2015, 20.0 million in fiscal year 2016, and 19 million in fiscal year 2017.

Sony released the PlayStation Classic, a console pre-loaded with 20 games from the original PlayStation console's catalog, on December 3 (commemorating the December 3, 1994 release date of the original PlayStation).

Sony Interactive Entertainment will not attend the Entertainment Software Association's 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) event in June. Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden explained that E3, held in June, is too late in the year for a trade show where the company has Christmas holiday discussions with retailers.

Sources: Wired (Peter Rubin) via Gematsu, Siliconera

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2019-04-16 16:24:00Z
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