The PS5 and Xbox 2 thread - it's happening

[Dexter]

http://videogameschronicle.com/news/sources-playstation-is-winding-down-sony-japan-studio/

Sources: PlayStation is winding down Sony Japan Studio
Majority of development staff have been let go, but ASOBI Team remains, sources tell VGC
25th Feb 2021 / 7:03 pm

Reporting by Andy Robinson and Alex Calvin.
Sony is winding down original game development at its oldest first-party developer, Japan Studio, multiple sources have told VGC.

The iconic developer behind Ape Escape, Gravity Rush and Knack has seen the vast majority of its development staff let go, the sources said, after their annual contracts were not renewed ahead of the company’s next business year, which begins April 1.

Localisation and business staff will remain in place and ASOBI Team – the group responsible for the Astro Bot games – will continue as a standalone studio within Sony Japan, it’s claimed.

Some Japan Studio staff will join ASOBI, we were told, while others have followed Silent Hill and Gravity Rush director Keiichiro Toyama – who left Japan Studio last year – to his new studio Bokeh.

It’s not entirely clear if the restructure has affected the studio’s External Development Department, which collaborated on games such as last year’s Demon’s Souls, but one person VGC spoke to suggested it would continue.

Sony Interactive Entertainment did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Multiple Japan Studio developers have announced their departure from the company on social media in the last few days, including Bloodborne producer Masaaki Yamagiwa and video manager Ryo Sogabe – who are both leaving at the end of February – while a cryptic tweet from executive producer Masami Yamamoto also hints at his departure.

This also follows several high profile staff at the studio leaving. At the end of 2020, Silent Hill and Gravity Rush series director Keiichiro Toyama announced his departure to set up Bokeh Game Studio. He founded this new venture with fellow Sony Japan veterans Kazunobu Sato and Junya Okura.

Meanwhile, the producer of Bloodborne and the Demons Souls remake Teruyuki Toriyama said he was leaving SIE Japan at the end of 2020.

People with knowledge of the matter told VGC that Sony Japan Studio simply hasn’t been profitable enough in recent years; the developer wanted to create games that appealed to the Japanese market first with hopes of having global appeal, while PlayStation wants the kind of global hits that its other first-party studios produce.

One person VGC spoke to said that Japan Studio’s fate had been sealed over a year ago, following the departure of its long-time president Allan Becker, who was replaced by Astro Bot: Rescue Mission director Nicolas Doucet, allegedly due to frustration over the developer’s lack of hits.

Another source said that this was part of PlayStation shifting more power from its native Japan to its new US headquarters. Since the company moved its HQ to California in 2016, it has been centralising power there, leading to layoffs and restructuring in SIE’s regional offices.

VGC’s reporting corroborates a Bloomberg article from November of last year, which said that Sony Japan had been “sidelined” and its development teams had been cut.


PlayStation boss Jim Ryan has downplayed this narrative several times; in December, he claimed that Japan continued to be a hugely important market for Sony Interactive Entertainment.

This week Famitsu published an interview with Ryan in which he said he considered all of SIE’s studios to be important and that he continued to support Japanese game development for PS5.

Bloomberg’s earlier report claimed that, as of November last year, many Japan Studio creators had already been informed that they would not have their rolling contracts renewed.

PlayStation’s US office has held a critical view of the Japanese operation, the publication claimed, and believed that the PlayStation business didn’t need ‘games that only do well in Japan’.

Responding to the November Bloomberg report, Sony spokeswoman Natsumi Atarashi said at the time that “our home market remains of utmost importance” and claimed that any suggestion Sony was shifting its focus away from Japan was incorrect and “doesn’t reflect the company’s strategy”.

Speaking to VGC’s network partners at GamesIndustry.biz about PlayStation’s globalisation efforts in 2019, Ryan said we shouldn’t expect its Worldwide Studios to create games designed for specific territories going forwards.

“The nature of AAA PlayStation 4 and certainly PlayStation 5 development… We’re obviously not going to have Worldwide Studios make a game for one specific European country,” he said.





Sony Japan ‘has been sidelined’ from PlayStation 5’s launch, a new report claims
Development staff are said to have been reduced as PlayStation places importance on the US market

“And that might have been the case back in the PSP times with Invizimals [which was popular in Spain]. I think this will be where Shuhei Yoshida‘s new task [of working with indies] will come in. If we are nimble, flexible and global, we can work with smaller developers to allow those countries’ specific needs to be met.”

Japan Studio was founded in 1993 and has created iconic PlayStation IP like Ape Escape, Patapon and Gravity Rush, in addition to assisting other developers such as FromSoftware, Bluepoint and Q-Games.

Japan Studio is Sony Interactive Entertainment‘s oldest first-party studio, with a focus on introducing new styles of gameplay.

The developer is known for games such as Knack, LocoRoco and Ape Escape, as well as its collaborations on the likes of Bloodborne, The Last Guardian and Everybody’s Golf. It most recently worked on PS5’s Demon’s Souls with US studio Bluepoint.

SIE Japan Studio also housed Project Siren – aka Team Gravity – which had worked on the Siren and Gravity Rush series.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Tried out my nephews PS5 the other day, that haptic shit in the pad is complete bollocks.

 

[J_C]

So this was in the event last night:

I don't care how much decline you are shouting, this can be one of the greatest thing ever made. The only game where I could feel like Jackie Chan was Sleeping Dogs, so this is a Godsent for me. A Kung-fu fag like myself will lap this up on day one. Not on PS5 of course, because it will come out on PC as well.

 

[Wunderbar]

game where I could feel like Jackie Chan

not enough environmental interactions. True "Jackie Chan" game should give you the ability to beat people using chairs and ladders.

 

[The Decline]

http://videogameschronicle.com/news/sources-playstation-is-winding-down-sony-japan-studio/

Sources: PlayStation is winding down Sony Japan Studio
Majority of development staff have been let go, but ASOBI Team remains, sources tell VGC
25th Feb 2021 / 7:03 pm

Reporting by Andy Robinson and Alex Calvin.
Sony is winding down original game development at its oldest first-party developer, Japan Studio, multiple sources have told VGC.

The iconic developer behind Ape Escape, Gravity Rush and Knack has seen the vast majority of its development staff let go, the sources said, after their annual contracts were not renewed ahead of the company’s next business year, which begins April 1.

Localisation and business staff will remain in place and ASOBI Team – the group responsible for the Astro Bot games – will continue as a standalone studio within Sony Japan, it’s claimed.

Some Japan Studio staff will join ASOBI, we were told, while others have followed Silent Hill and Gravity Rush director Keiichiro Toyama – who left Japan Studio last year – to his new studio Bokeh.

It’s not entirely clear if the restructure has affected the studio’s External Development Department, which collaborated on games such as last year’s Demon’s Souls, but one person VGC spoke to suggested it would continue.

Sony Interactive Entertainment did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Multiple Japan Studio developers have announced their departure from the company on social media in the last few days, including Bloodborne producer Masaaki Yamagiwa and video manager Ryo Sogabe – who are both leaving at the end of February – while a cryptic tweet from executive producer Masami Yamamoto also hints at his departure.

This also follows several high profile staff at the studio leaving. At the end of 2020, Silent Hill and Gravity Rush series director Keiichiro Toyama announced his departure to set up Bokeh Game Studio. He founded this new venture with fellow Sony Japan veterans Kazunobu Sato and Junya Okura.

Meanwhile, the producer of Bloodborne and the Demons Souls remake Teruyuki Toriyama said he was leaving SIE Japan at the end of 2020.

People with knowledge of the matter told VGC that Sony Japan Studio simply hasn’t been profitable enough in recent years; the developer wanted to create games that appealed to the Japanese market first with hopes of having global appeal, while PlayStation wants the kind of global hits that its other first-party studios produce.

One person VGC spoke to said that Japan Studio’s fate had been sealed over a year ago, following the departure of its long-time president Allan Becker, who was replaced by Astro Bot: Rescue Mission director Nicolas Doucet, allegedly due to frustration over the developer’s lack of hits.

Another source said that this was part of PlayStation shifting more power from its native Japan to its new US headquarters. Since the company moved its HQ to California in 2016, it has been centralising power there, leading to layoffs and restructuring in SIE’s regional offices.

VGC’s reporting corroborates a Bloomberg article from November of last year, which said that Sony Japan had been “sidelined” and its development teams had been cut.


PlayStation boss Jim Ryan has downplayed this narrative several times; in December, he claimed that Japan continued to be a hugely important market for Sony Interactive Entertainment.

This week Famitsu published an interview with Ryan in which he said he considered all of SIE’s studios to be important and that he continued to support Japanese game development for PS5.

Bloomberg’s earlier report claimed that, as of November last year, many Japan Studio creators had already been informed that they would not have their rolling contracts renewed.

PlayStation’s US office has held a critical view of the Japanese operation, the publication claimed, and believed that the PlayStation business didn’t need ‘games that only do well in Japan’.

Responding to the November Bloomberg report, Sony spokeswoman Natsumi Atarashi said at the time that “our home market remains of utmost importance” and claimed that any suggestion Sony was shifting its focus away from Japan was incorrect and “doesn’t reflect the company’s strategy”.

Speaking to VGC’s network partners at GamesIndustry.biz about PlayStation’s globalisation efforts in 2019, Ryan said we shouldn’t expect its Worldwide Studios to create games designed for specific territories going forwards.

“The nature of AAA PlayStation 4 and certainly PlayStation 5 development… We’re obviously not going to have Worldwide Studios make a game for one specific European country,” he said.





Sony Japan ‘has been sidelined’ from PlayStation 5’s launch, a new report claims
Development staff are said to have been reduced as PlayStation places importance on the US market

“And that might have been the case back in the PSP times with Invizimals [which was popular in Spain]. I think this will be where Shuhei Yoshida‘s new task [of working with indies] will come in. If we are nimble, flexible and global, we can work with smaller developers to allow those countries’ specific needs to be met.”

Japan Studio was founded in 1993 and has created iconic PlayStation IP like Ape Escape, Patapon and Gravity Rush, in addition to assisting other developers such as FromSoftware, Bluepoint and Q-Games.

Japan Studio is Sony Interactive Entertainment‘s oldest first-party studio, with a focus on introducing new styles of gameplay.

The developer is known for games such as Knack, LocoRoco and Ape Escape, as well as its collaborations on the likes of Bloodborne, The Last Guardian and Everybody’s Golf. It most recently worked on PS5’s Demon’s Souls with US studio Bluepoint.

SIE Japan Studio also housed Project Siren – aka Team Gravity – which had worked on the Siren and Gravity Rush series.

Globohomo finishes its first major strike against Japan.

 

[J_C]

game where I could feel like Jackie Chan

not enough environmental interactions. True "Jackie Chan" game should give you the ability to beat people using chairs and ladders.

That's why I loved Sleeping Dogs where you had that environmental interaction. It would be great if this game had it, but at least I will have my hong-kong martial arts gameplay.

 

[Caim]

So this was in the event last night:

I don't care how much decline you are shouting, this can be one of the greatest thing ever made. The only game where I could feel like Jackie Chan was Sleeping Dogs, so this is a Godsent for me. A Kung-fu fag like myself will lap this up on day one. Not on PS5 of course, because it will come out on PC as well.

Kinda gives me vibes of The Raid and similar movies at times. If they manage to find a middle ground between Sleeping Dogs and Yakuza we might end up with one of the best brawlers of our time.

 

[User was nabbed fit]

Tried out my nephews PS5 the other day, that haptic shit in the pad is complete bollocks.

There are very few games which are programmed with support for it in mind. Astro's Playground is one of them though, makes good use of it in some areas. Anything else is going to seem like bollocks though, because it's non-existent in unsupported games. I'd rate it a 7.5/10 as a feature, because it's not exactly breathtaking, but it's pretty decent when used properly. I expect future PS5-exclusive games will make good use of it, since devs will have an actual incentive to put decent time into it. As opposed to multiplatform games, where they're really not going to care that much about spending time & money on something that's only going to affect one of the platforms and probably won't generate any extra sales.

 

[Gerrard]

future PS5-exclusive games

 

[Morgoth]

"Restructuring" must be the new corporate euphemism for "shuttering".

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

So this was in the event last night:

I don't care how much decline you are shouting, this can be one of the greatest thing ever made. The only game where I could feel like Jackie Chan was Sleeping Dogs, so this is a Godsent for me. A Kung-fu fag like myself will lap this up on day one. Not on PS5 of course, because it will come out on PC as well.

Looks like a fleshed out Karateka remake spiritual successor.

 

[Markman]

Sifu looks cool. Hope its not exclusive.

Cant figure out what is causing audio lag on the series x, when I reboot it its fine but when I wake it from standby it got like 0.5 seconds of audio lag. Annoying as fuck.
I can change it to shut down instead of stand by but then I cant install games or stream from the mobile app.

 

[ferratilis]

Sifu looks cool. Hope its not exclusive.

Good news - it's not a console exclusive.
Bad news - it's an Epic Store exclusive.

 

[Gerrard]

"Restructuring" must be the new corporate euphemism for "shuttering".

Actually, it's a pretty old euphemism for "firing a bunch of people".

 

[J_C]

Sifu looks cool. Hope its not exclusive.

Bad news - it's an Epic Store exclusive.

 

[Baron Dupek]

https://gadgettendency.com/this-is-a-breakthrough-sony-playstation-5-has-been-adapted-for-mining/

The Sony PlayStation 5 game console is not suitable for mining, the mining of cryptocurrency is limited by the system. However, Chinese enthusiasts have managed to get around this limitation.

The hardware components of the PlayStation 5 are quite suitable and sufficient for mining, however, until now, this task has not been possible to implement on the console. Console uses AMD Ryzen CPU on Zen 2 microarchitecture (x86, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 3.5 GHz) and AMD Radeon GPU with RDNA 2 architecture (ray tracing acceleration; up to 2.23 GHz, 10.3 teraflops) …

Etherium mining was successfully launched on the console, which is confirmed by the photo with the screenshot. Judging by the screenshot, the mining performance of the console reaches 98.76 MH / s, and the power consumption is 211 W.

We cannot exclude the possibility that for such a result the console was not only hacked, but also overclocked, since its “native” performance should be at the level of AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT with 50 MH / s.

At the end of last week it became known that the enthusiast managed to launch the Ethereum mining process on a MacBook Air with an Apple M1 SoC.

Now playing game(s?) will be even harder.

 

[Tehdagah]

Sifu looks cool. Hope its not exclusive.

Good news - it's not a console exclusive.
Bad news - it's an Epic Store exclusive.

That's good news, it means the discounts will be better during sales

 

[Morgoth]

 

[aweigh]

There are very few games which are programmed with support for it in mind. Astro's Playground is one of them though, makes good use of it in some areas. Anything else is going to seem like bollocks though, because it's non-existent in unsupported games. I'd rate it a 7.5/10 as a feature, because it's not exactly breathtaking, but it's pretty decent when used properly. I expect future PS5-exclusive games will make good use of it, since devs will have an actual incentive to put decent time into it. As opposed to multiplatform games, where they're really not going to care that much about spending time & money on something that's only going to affect one of the platforms and probably won't generate any extra sales.

and ultimate rumble

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulta...-deal-is-a-bad-look-for-sony/?sh=14a2f5f234bf

Game Pass vs $70: The ‘MLB The Show’ Xbox Deal Is A Bad Look For Sony

Yesterday, Microsoft shocked the gaming world when they announced that MLB: The Show 21, formerly a PlayStation exclusive franchise, was coming to Xbox Game Pass on launch day.

It was already known that The Show 21 would be released on Xbox, but to have that flip from being PlayStation exclusive since 2006 to “free” on Game Pass is a wild switch, and right now, all of this is an extremely bad look for Sony, more so than the usual “Game Pass has X new release” situation.

Here’s a rough timeline about what has apparently happened here, and where we are now:

• In order for Sony to retain the rights to The Show, part of their new MLB deal was that the game had to be multiplatform, hence the release on Xbox.
• But it seems Microsoft went directly to the MLB to try and work out a deal to get it on Game Pass too. The publisher of the Xbox version is listed as the MLB, not Sony. And so some (very large) amount of money was likely paid to make that happen.
• Now we have a situation where The Show has gone from being a Sony exclusive franchise for 15 years to being on Xbox Game Pass day one, with the game still built by San Diego Studios, a first party Sony developer.
• The PlayStation version of the show is listed for $70, while it appears the only way to get both the PS4 and PS5 versions of the game together is an $85 bundle.

In short, ouch.

While this isn’t like Microsoft stealing Kratos or Nathan Drake or anything, it’s not that far off, honestly, and they have deftly outmaneuvered Sony here, which has now effectively produced a highly sought-after Game Pass game. I suppose it’s possible that Sony/San Diego received some amount of money for all this, as who knows the exact fine print of these deals, but most of this seems driven by the MLB where they wanted their baseball game on more platforms, and if MS will pay them for Game Pass access? Sure, why not.

Microsoft has always tried to force this advantage over Sony, especially this generation, where Game Pass looks like a good alternative to full-priced games, but usually it’s comparing things like Gears 5 or Sea of Thieves to God of War or Ghost of Tsushima. Sort of apples and oranges and fans could make the argument that those games are “worth” full price on PlayStation, and are just better games in general. But here, this is an example of the same game, where Sony, who made the game, is listing it at $70 on PlayStation while Xbox players simply get it with Game Pass. That’s wild. This sort of happened with Ouriders too, another third party game Xbox snatched up for a Game Pass launch while Sony is selling it at full price, but the difference there is that a Sony studio didn’t make Outriders.

Game Pass is going to continue to be a thorn in Sony’s side indefinitely here, and they reportedly have no plans to match it past their current PS Plus/Now offerings, and things like the PS Plus Collection, a large bundle of great, free games for players. But for new releases, you can bet we are going to keep seeing Microsoft making moves like this, but what they’ve done with The Show here is on another level entirely.

 

[Caim]

Aaaaand of course it's got microtransactions as well. That makes it a very easy choice as to what platform to buy it for.

 

[fork]

A sane person simply wouldn't buy it at all.

 

[Cyberarmy]

My Little Bony?

 

[cosmicray]

I didn't even know there was a baseball game, let alone some kind of a killer app exclusive.

 

[DemonKing]

Got a free Gamepass Ultimate membership for a few weeks and have to admit a Series S certainly makes a bit of sense now as a "Gamepass" box where you never actually end up buying any games (even though personally I would prefer a discless Series X was available with more power and a bigger SSD than the S). Would be hard to get by the wife though as I already have a PS5...