The PS5 and Xbox 2 thread - it's happening

[Zarniwoop]

Well, modern spasticated "gamers" insist on having full fucking voice acting in everything because they have the attention span of a gnat, so that's not gonna make things easy on the budgets.

Voice acting is fairly cheap.

It's not tho. Especially if you use famous actors.

 

[Ezekiel]

Coincidentally, I'm hearing that the movie and TV industries are also having massive problems with unsustainable budgets.

Yep, I recently read that the costs for Ridley Scott's sequel to Gladiator, Gladiator 2, is now close to $310m. It was originally budgeted at $165m. It seems to be a peculiar form of Western bloat. These ridiculously high game budgets only started to become a thing during PlayStation's Western shift. I think these movie-style games from Sony could be a thing of the past in the future, especially if that rumour about Sony having another shot at a portable PlayStation turns out to be true.

I don't watch much new television, but the end credits of Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series and Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal say, "This television production/film benefited from the French Tax Rebate for International Production." I've probably read it in the credits of many newer movies, but only remembered it there because of how many times I watched the end credits. Well, Primal was also animated by French people. I know there is a point buried somewhere in this post, or I wouldn't have written it. Something about filmmakers having to go through foreign tax incentives because American studios can't keep costs down. It's a little different from American studios filming and building their sets in cheaper England, since those crews usually had so many English people.

 

[Abu Antar]

Voice acting was a mistake.

 

[Elttharion]

Well, modern spasticated "gamers" insist on having full fucking voice acting in everything because they have the attention span of a gnat, so that's not gonna make things easy on the budgets.

Voice acting is fairly cheap.

Voice acting itself is cheap but Sony movie games also do a lot of mocap work and use only A lister actors. So you dont only have a dude reading a bunch of notes in a recording booth. You have a Hollywood actor spending days in a full blown studio recording audio, getting scanned, doing mocap, etc. And since every dialogue is voiced and animated that adds a lot.

 

[Ezekiel]

Well, modern spasticated "gamers" insist on having full fucking voice acting in everything because they have the attention span of a gnat, so that's not gonna make things easy on the budgets.

Voice acting is fairly cheap.

Voice acting itself is cheap but Sony movie games also do a lot of mocap work and use only A lister actors. So you dont only have a dude reading a bunch of notes in a recording booth. You have a Hollywood actor spending days in a full blown studio recording audio, getting scanned, doing mocap, etc. And since every dialogue is voiced and animated that adds a lot.

Agree with most of what you said, but A-list actors? How many names do you recognize from The Last of Us, Part II?

Ellie (Ashley Johnson)
Abigail "Abby" Anderson (Laura Bailey)
Joel Miller (Troy Baker) - Probably more expensive, but mostly only used until the character's early death.
Tommy (Jeffrey Pierce)
Dina (Shannon Woodward)

Doesn't seem like Christopher Judge from God of War (2018) got much work after Stargate.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Well, modern spasticated "gamers" insist on having full fucking voice acting in everything because they have the attention span of a gnat, so that's not gonna make things easy on the budgets.

Voice acting is fairly cheap.

Yeah, voice acting isn’t what’s driving up budgets. Random TV shows cartoons aren’t costing over a $100 million to make.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Well, modern spasticated "gamers" insist on having full fucking voice acting in everything because they have the attention span of a gnat, so that's not gonna make things easy on the budgets.

Voice acting is fairly cheap.

Voice acting itself is cheap but Sony movie games also do a lot of mocap work and use only A lister actors. So you dont only have a dude reading a bunch of notes in a recording booth. You have a Hollywood actor spending days in a full blown studio recording audio, getting scanned, doing mocap, etc. And since every dialogue is voiced and animated that adds a lot.

They don’t use A list actors. They use (some) voice actors you may have hear of. That Into the Spider-Verse movie I wouldn’t even say was an A list cast, but the cast sure as shit has bigger names and more well known actors than Sony’s Spider-Man games that cost vastly more money to make it seems.

Off the top of my head I can’t think of any Sony games with a cast of A list actors.

 

[Caim]

Off the top of my head I can’t think of any Sony games with a cast of A list actors.

Only one I can think of is Beyond: Two Souls.

 

[Elttharion]

I meant A list voice actors, not actors in general, my bad. Nolan North, Yuri Lowenthal, Troy Baker, Ashly Burch, Laura Bayley, etc. They also used Lance Reddick in Horizon for example. If you look at the IMDB page for GOW Ragnarok most of the main actors have dozens or more than a hundred previous works. I am not even considering Death Stranding since that game's cast is all on Kojimbo.

These people are not cheap.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I meant A list voice actors, not actors in general, my bad. Nolan North, Yuri Lowenthal, Troy Baker, Ashly Burch, Laura Bayley, etc. They also used Lance Reddick in Horizon for example. If you look at the IMDB page for GOW Ragnarok most of the main actors have dozens or more than a hundred previous works. I am not even considering Death Stranding since that game's cast is all on Kojimbo.

These people are not cheap.

They aren’t even A list voice actors. They’re voice actors you know from being in lots of video games. A list voice actors are like the cast of The Simpsons or something.

Lance Reddick wasn’t an A list actor either. He’s a character actor that mostly had minor roles in TV shows that occasionally does voice work.

The most famous person in God of War Ragnarök is probably TV actor Richard Schiff. The game is cast like some low budget show, or a movie from The Asylum. These cast aren’t costing a ton to put together.

My guess would be that comparatively speaking, video game voiceover work pays very little. You ever notice how the voiceover cast for Fallout, many of who still do voiceover work for cartoons, don’t really do video games anymore?

 

[911 Jumper]

More PS5 Pro info

Following this week’s leaks on the PlayStation 5 Pro GPU specs and performance targets, Insider Gaming has learned more PlayStation 5 Pro specs. For comparison sake, we’ll also include the specifications of the Standard PlayStation 5.

System Memory
Standard PlayStation 5 – 448 GB/s (14 GT/s)
PlayStation 5 Pro – 576 GB/s (18GT/s) – A 28% increase over the standard console.

Also outlined is that the PlayStation 5 Pro’s system memory is more efficient than the standard console, so the bandwidth gain may increase by over 28%.

CPU
The CPU is identical to the standard PlayStation 5, however, the Pro has a ‘High CPU Frequency Mode”, which takes the CPU to 3.85GHz – A 10% increase over the standard console.

In High CPU Frequency Mode, more power is allocated to the CPU and will downclock the GPU by around 1.5%, resulting in roughly 1% lower GPU performance.

Audio
The ACV in the PlayStation 5 Pro runs at a higher clock speed over the standard PlayStation 5, resulting in the ACM library having 35% more performance.

More convolution reverbs can be processed
More FFT or IFFT can be processed
GPU (Previously revealed)
Rendering 45% faster than PS5
2-3x Ray-tracing (x4 in some cases)
33.5 Teraflops
PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling) upscaling/antialiasing solution
Support for resolutions up to 8K is planned for future SDK version
Custom machine learning architecture
AI Accelerator, supporting 300 TOPS of 8 bit computation / 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point
In addition: 30 WGPs running specialised BVH8 traversal shaders vs 18 WGPs running BVH4 tranversal shaders on the standard PlayStation 5.

It’s also understood that as a means to make the PlayStation 5 Pro as “competitive” (not my phrasing here) as possible, it will have a detachable disc drive which will be identical to the latest iteration of the standard PlayStation 5, and 1TB of storage space.

Currently, the PlayStation 5 Pro is running on SKD 9.00, and SKD 10.00 is expected in Fall 2024, which is the current targeted release date of the console.

Source: Insider Gaming

So 1TB onboard storage and it sounds as if they are keeping the detachable drive, which suggests it's gonna have a similar form factor to the current Slim, but it'll surely be bigger. It'll be interesting to see what it looks like.

 

[911 Jumper]

Another addition to Sony's pile of failed hardware products

 

[Zarniwoop]

Another addition to Sony's pile of failed hardware products

Typical Sony.

Make a shitpile of VR goggles no one wants, but the PS Portal that people actually do want is out of stock everywhere for months. Just like the PS5 itself was.

 

[Elttharion]

I meant A list voice actors, not actors in general, my bad. Nolan North, Yuri Lowenthal, Troy Baker, Ashly Burch, Laura Bayley, etc. They also used Lance Reddick in Horizon for example. If you look at the IMDB page for GOW Ragnarok most of the main actors have dozens or more than a hundred previous works. I am not even considering Death Stranding since that game's cast is all on Kojimbo.

These people are not cheap.

They aren’t even A list voice actors. They’re voice actors you know from being in lots of video games. A list voice actors are like the cast of The Simpsons or something.

Lance Reddick wasn’t an A list actor either. He’s a character actor that mostly had minor roles in TV shows that occasionally does voice work.

The most famous person in God of War Ragnarök is probably TV actor Richard Schiff. The game is cast like some low budget show, or a movie from The Asylum. These cast aren’t costing a ton to put together.

My guess would be that comparatively speaking, video game voiceover work pays very little. You ever notice how the voiceover cast for Fallout, many of who still do voiceover work for cartoons, don’t really do video games anymore?

I get your point but, again, I am talking famous actors in the context of video games. The actors pay might not be high but Sony is hyper fixated in fidelity so they spend a ton of money in support studios and equipment.

Voice acting itself is not the cause of their hyper budgets but its a symptom of the way they approach game development. Ultra Realistic graphics, animations, voice acting, etc. All of that adds up. Sony remastered Spiderman 1 and the biggest change was making Peter's model be closer to the VA so that he had better facial animations. They could have made a more stylized game and spent less on that, focus more on gameplay and story and less on the cinematic experience. I always compare them to FromSoft who used to not even animate the faces of most of their characters, the majority didnt even move their mouths when they spoke in the old games.

Think of how Naughty Dog crunched their animators so much a few of them had to be hospitalized. Or how they burned through all game animators in the LA area so they had to hire and train film animators because no game dev wanted to work for them.

 

[deuxhero]

I watch H3VR gameplay. The people who are serious about the game are very quick to tell everyone who expresses interest in getting into VR that VR headsets are everywhere on the used market. Not sure why anyone would build new ones when that's the case.

Another addition to Sony's pile of failed hardware products

Typical Sony.

Make a shitpile of VR goggles no one wants, but the PS Portal that people actually do want is out of stock everywhere for months. Just like the PS5 itself was.

People want a device that does nothing but stream locally from a system you have to already own?

 

[Zarniwoop]

I watch H3VR gameplay. The people who are serious about the game are very quick to tell everyone who expresses interest in getting into VR that VR headsets are everywhere on the used market.

Another addition to Sony's pile of failed hardware products

Typical Sony.

Make a shitpile of VR goggles no one wants, but the PS Portal that people actually do want is out of stock everywhere for months. Just like the PS5 itself was.

People want a device that does nothing but stream locally from a system you have to already own?

It streams anywhere, not just locally.

And yes, it's a lot cheaper than buying a new tv for every room in the house. And lugging your ps5 around and plugging in the cables each time.

 

[911 Jumper]

Another addition to Sony's pile of failed hardware products

Typical Sony.

Make a shitpile of VR goggles no one wants, but the PS Portal that people actually do want is out of stock everywhere for months. Just like the PS5 itself was.

VR2 was never going to fly at $599. Couple that price with the price of the PS5 itself and it's $1100+ just to experience VR on PS5. That is going to put a lot of people off, especially in the current economic climate. I think PS5 Pro will also struggle. It's probably going to cost $600+, and this time around, there are fewer incentives to upgrade to a Pro model.

 

[Tehdagah]

 

[911 Jumper]

lol

 

[DemonKing]

People want a device that does nothing but stream locally from a system you have to already own?

Yeah I don't get it either. If I want to play on my PS5 I want to play on the big screen in my living room, not on an 8" LCD, and if I'm not at home I've got tons of time wasters already on my phone or Ipad.

Saying that, it must be satisfying some part of the market as it seems to be selling ok.

 

[911 Jumper]

 

[SlamDunk]

Valve reignited the handheld fire with the success of Steam Deck.

 

[911 Jumper]

Can't see what a portable Xbox is going to offer that Steam Deck and all the other portables don't already offer. Xbox doesn't even have a compelling library of exclusives to entice people. They can't even shift their home consoles because the software line-up is lacking. Once again this seems to be a symptom of Xbox leadership thinking its main problem is hardware-based.

 

[Tehdagah]

Can't see what a portable Xbox is going to offer that Steam Deck and all the other portables don't already offer. Xbox doesn't even have a compelling library of exclusives to entice people. They can't even shift their home consoles because the software line-up is lacking. Once again this seems to be a symptom of Xbox leadership thinking its main problem is hardware-based.

It would be the best portable to run Fortnite.

 

[taxalot]

The use of a handheld device that streams from your biggest machine is immediately apparent if you have children.

(Hint : the device is not for the children).

Spoiler

As soon as I turn a game on the TV or on the computer, I've got two little creatures gathering next to me, which is not something I want at all times. Also, streaming is now good enough that when everyone is in bed I can play on the TV at 1080p with decent quality with no config hassle or savegame syncing issues.

My Steam Deck is mostly used in remote play mode.