As we draw closer to the PS5's release date in late 2020, it's understandable that the rumor mill is working overtime. But, while some rumors hold a bit more weight than others, there are a few that need be taken with more than just a pinch of salt.
The latest PS5 'leak' posted on 4Chan is one such rumor, supposedly spilling a bunch of information on the PS5 reveal event which is expected to take place in February. The leak, which was reposted on Reddit, claims that the PS5 will be unveiled on February 5 at a PlayStation Meeting event for the media.
According to the leaker, the event will see Sony revealing the console's design and specs, several PS5 exclusives, a renewed focus on PlayStation Now, alongside the console's price and various other features.
- PS5 vs Xbox Series X: what we know so far
- Xbox Series X: release date, specs, design and launch titles
- Sony PS5 controller: release date, news and confirmed features
https://www.techradar.com/news/this-latest-ps5-rumor-sound-too-good-to-be-true
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday January 21 2020, @09:52AM (3 children)
The ones who removed the previously advertised linux from the PS3? BTW after the rootkit fiasco here in my quarters the only sony equipment is one (average performing) amplifier and loudspeakers I got for free.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday January 21 2020, @10:26AM (2 children)
These things are likely to be somewhat customized AMD x86 PCs running FreeBSD. Maybe with some ARM companion cores thrown in. It might be sold for cheaper than you could build a comparable gaming PC... for the first year or two.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday January 21 2020, @05:27PM (1 child)
PS4 is AMD Jaguar, Fam 16, not much of interest today. But the Dualshock controllers are interesting and pretty hackable stuff, both on USB and Bluetooth. Classic STM32F407 and Qualcomm Atheros AR3002. Well worth of HW/SW modding.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 21 2020, @07:56PM
That reminds me, Zen 3 is being designated "19h", for what it's worth:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-zen-3-linux-patch [pcgamesn.com]
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Zen-3-Patches-Start-5.6 [phoronix.com]
You would think they would wait for Zen4/AM5 to do that, but there it is. More hype for the hype train.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by J_Darnley on Tuesday January 21 2020, @11:12AM (12 children)
I don't believe I would be able to put an original Playstation disc in the optical drive and play.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @11:44AM (2 children)
Agreed. Sony might let you download an original Playstation game from their servers and play it, though -- after you pay for it again, of course.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by chewbacon on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:44PM (1 child)
Which would fundamentally defeat the claim of backwards compatibility in my book.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 22 2020, @10:28AM
Depends on who it's for. If you've already got an old console and a load of games, then that's one thing, but part of the appeal is for people who don't own any older PlayStations but liked some of the older games. The Xbox Game Pass, for example, includes a bunch of Xbox 360 games that I enjoy. I don't own a 360, so I don't have any older games, but the fact that I can play (some of?) the older games means that there's an existing catalogue for a new console.
I doubt that it will work with PS1 disks. They had the spiral the opposite way around to normal CDs as a copy-protection feature, so you'd need an optical drive with a reversible motor, which would put up the costs for a fairly limited use case. A lot of new games basically use the optical disk as a token to authorise you to download the game, so for PS2 and later consoles that approach could work for a lot of things, though supporting every game in an emulator seems challenging.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 21 2020, @11:44AM (5 children)
It probably means that ports of all games from previous gens will be downloadable and playable, or the console will emulate the previous architectures. Which is two gens of MIPS, and PowerPC/Cell, then x86.
If it's the latter, I don't see why it couldn't support reading from the original discs. Although a disc from 1995 should be in a museum, not your PS7.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Tuesday January 21 2020, @02:25PM
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:55PM (2 children)
Well, one reason could be that it might not have a drive...
--
Sometimes people want to have full conversations
in the morning. It's okay to ignore those people.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 21 2020, @07:48PM (1 child)
It's already confirmed to support spinning discs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_5 [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 22 2020, @04:33AM
Sounds good if the compatibility bit is true!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @07:21PM
Great, now the theme music from Indiana Jones is going to be in my head all day.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Tuesday January 21 2020, @05:36PM
That is exactly what you can do on a PS3. Put in an old black bottomed disc and away it goes. Not sure about PS4 or this upcoming console.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @08:10PM (1 child)
Why not? All models of PS3 had support for playing original playstation disks, the original models essentially have backwards-compatible PS2 hardware inside them and later models support PS1 games through software emulation. The PS1 disks themselves are readable with standard CD-ROM drive. It would not be a big stretch to replicate this functionality on the PS5.
However I don't expect to see software emulation happening for PS3 game disks.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 22 2020, @04:50AM
Sony's PlayStation Classic [wikipedia.org] actually ships with a third-party open source PS1 emulator.
PS3 emulation [wikipedia.org] is still in its infancy, but they might be able to make something happen. Or they could try a Stadia-like approach using Sony servers. Or they could offer downloadable ports. Or it could just be a false rumor.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Tuesday January 21 2020, @12:08PM (9 children)
I think the last thing I parted with any significant amount of money for was... an N64.
The last thing I used... excluding a friend's PS4 to play at a games night, maybe a Wii?
I wasn't enthused.
Yet I'm a mad gamer, I have thousands of hours in some games, and thousands of games. I just don't get the "pay a fortune, and then £60 a game, and then download for 8 hours, to play a short - but sure, pretty - console game" thing.
I got so bored with the current round, when I had a bit of spare cash and wanted something to last me through a quiet Christmas, that I couldn't find anything other than the Switch interesting, and in the end found more fun building an arcade cabinet and playing some retro games instead (and at least I didn't have to re-buy them all from the Nintendo store or whatever).
My brother bought whatever the XBox thing was he bought at the same time - spent Christmas Day and most of Boxing Day waiting for the games to download so his son could play. In the end, they ended up playing Minecraft. I found it most odd, given the money that he'd spend on it, that that was the kind of service and game he got on a "new" console (I know it's not really the latest console, but the latest revision of the previous console).
I ran an event just before Christmas where a load of schoolkids all brought in their consoles to play games and we had to set them up. Apart from the fact that a whole crowd of teenagers couldn't work out how to cable their own consoles, let alone the older ones like a Wii, they were stopped dead by the fact that there was no wifi. Even when they tried to "play offline" it just didn't work, or they were severely restricted in what did work, no matter how many disks or how much preloading at home they tried.
I can't say I understand it at all. It's like the Disney DVDs where you have to sit through 20+ minutes of trailers... I mean... that's a movie for KIDS. And it's got unskippable trailers. At what point does paying a premium to spend 20 minutes with screaming kids desperate to watch a particular movie having to sulk for all that time because "they've seen all those" become something that is valuable?
You pay extra for convenience, surely, not hassle? There was a point where consoles were instant-on, no-downloads, simple-setup, standard-controller... and at that point I could understand why people would pay for them, to make their life easy. But now it's the complete flip of that.
Who knows what's going to happen in 20+ year's time, where all the "old" games are just going to be unavailable and won't work because the servers are down, and the only way to get them is to hope the company remakes them and puts them on their cloud service tied to their new console. I certainly won't care. I resigned myself years ago to "I have enough games to last me a lifetime, even with a ton of new discoveries", and I have them all on the same machine that has all my movies, music, entertainment, books, older games, computer setup, office suite, browser, etc. that I carry around with me.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 21 2020, @12:25PM (3 children)
So, the argument goes, it's "cheap" entertainment. If you work out the per-hour of end-user screen time cost, it's less than buying DVDs (although the used market for DVDs has kind of tanked around here, you can purchase them for $2 each or borrow them from the library for free...) My theory is that the 8 hours of downloading is yet another "value" - wasting your time, which is what the whole thing is about when you get down to it. It certainly is why PS3 was my last console purchase and I'm unlikely to ever buy another.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @01:34PM
This is why I view Minecraft as the the best (most efficient) entertainment buy I have ever made.
8 years ago I paid $25 for the game, I don't know how many hours of entertainment I have gotten out of it, but it is many.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by SunTzuWarmaster on Tuesday January 21 2020, @02:46PM (1 child)
I bought a PS4 last Christmas-ish. $400. SpiderMan version - with Spiderman. I played Spiderman to completion, on the order of 70+ hours - all difficulties, all side missions, all suits, all everything. Let's call it 70 hours for Spiderman - $5.7/hour. It also does the Amazon and the D+, and whatever - but I would have figured that out with apps and Chromecast and stuff, so that's a wash.
Then I got hooked on Brawlhalla, which is great btw, and have 200+ hours in Brawlhalla (its my freetime I do what I want!), and spend another $60 on fun skins (YOLO!). So let's call it 270 hours for $460. $1.70/hour per entertainment.
Note that this is in its first year of use. This price goes *down* from here. Also - I am the only one who is playing (cost/use will decrease when kids start playing). This price/dollar ratio competes favorably with *used books*. Does your $200 craigslist bike get 118 hours of use? Do you watch 30 hours of TV/month on a $50 cable subscription? I signed up for a $17/hour gymnastics instructor (10x the cost of video games!). Our Florida pool is significantly more expensive on a per-hour basis (on the order of $3/hour, still cheap though).
Say what you want about the per-use cost, but this console is *dirt* cheap in terms of price. $460 is a lot of money, but $38/month over the first year isn't, and $19/month amortized across 2 years is very very cheap. Our pool requires an $8000 resurfacing. I read 24ish books/year - $240ish. Hell, I've spent $200 on hiking shoes in the last 2 years. Even "taking walks in the woods" has a cost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 22 2020, @06:26AM
Your price does not go down because of planned obsolescence. Shortly after the PS5 hits, your system will no longer be able to play new games, because they will no longer be being made for your system. Also don't forget to include the monthly fee you're paying to Sony to let you use your own internet connection. By contrast, I game on a computer I also use for work so I'd consider the cost there to be $0. As for games, I'll take one example: Mount and Blade. I picked it up for about $5. I've put well over a 1000 hours into that game. Would highly recommend, especially the Prophecy of Pendor mod - best gaming experience I've had, perhaps ever. The hourly cost is practically $0.
From my perspective I played on consoles exclusively until the PS4. The reason was deeply subsidized hardware. For instance the original XBox had a video card in it that was worth more than the retail cost for the entire system, and one that would have broke you trying to buy on a PC. The PS4/XBone were, by contrast, mid-range PCs and sold at about the same price. So you're basically paying $400 to get ring-fenced in, and then to be forced to pay a monthly fee to Sony/Microsoft to use your own internet connection. Seriously, most games do not even have dedicated servers. You are literally paying Sony/Microsoft to let you host multiplayer games on your own internet connection on your own hardware. At least the new subscription comes with some games, before it was a 100% scam - now perhaps it's only an 80% scam.
I recently decided to pick up a new video card. It was an RX570 - a budget card. Cost: $100. It substantially outperforms the PS4 in specs and also uses less energy - the PS4 CPU is also extremely low end. So even the times when I'm in the mood for a consoley game, I get a more pleasant experience. As an example there, I picked up Middle Earth: Shadow of War on a humble bundle (incidentally, you can also get it this month + 8 other games of your choosing) alongside all DC. Price was again around $10. Put a couple of hundred hours in that game with a silky smooth 60FPS at max settings.
Not really a PC Master Race type person, but I do think that consoles no longer make sense. I do think they made a whole lot more sense the further you go back in history. And they might make sense in the future if they're able to deliver a high quality VR gaming experience and a heavily subsidized price, but that seems unlikely given the current direction of the companies. But for now at least they're just a very poor value proposition.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 21 2020, @12:27PM
It certainly seems like there's going to be a "hole in history" where games like StarCraft I will live forever while StarCraft II is going to fade into obscurity due to lack of cloud support. I say hole, I hope it's a hole and not simply a cliff - well, I guess I really don't care - that's future generations' problem, and I hope for their sake that a significant non-DRM body of work continues to be produced, but if not, that's their choice, and their loss.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @01:27PM
Same here.
Played arcades in the golden era, not amused by home videogames until 3d cards became available for PCs, stopped giving a damn when online DRM and inability to self host became the norm, now I play MAME, free software games (sdl ones like cube2 sauerbraten are good enough for me), looking forward to play some driving sims in single user mode.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:58PM
The last console I purchased was a PS3 to replace my dead original PS3. I also got a Wii. I loved playing PS3 when I had a friend that would come over to play in my house. It's a great system for co-op games, in my experience, that's what Console games are great at, creating a fun co-op experience. I also had quite a bit of fun with the Wii and it's to date the most innovative Console, though perhaps the Playstation VR takes the crown. I fell out of love with consoles when I noted how cheap I could get PC games. Sure, PCs can be a bit of a mixed bag, but I can build my own machine with sweet specs at a reasonable price that lasts for years. Also, there is no GOG for Consoles. I'll take the occasional $60 hit on a game series I love, but I'm certainly not going to do it for every single game I want to play.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 22 2020, @10:55AM (1 child)
I bought an Xbox One S a few months ago. At work, we get a free subscription to Xbox Game Pass, which is a subscription service for around 100 games. I'm not sure if I'd pay for it (though it's about as expensive as Netflix and I think I spend more time playing the games on it than I do watching Netflix, so maybe), but it was a good excuse to get an Xbox. The One S is the budget model and I picked mine up (new) for around £180. It's the first console I've owned. The main selling points for me are:
I own The Witcher 3 on PC, but I played it through again on the console when it came on Game Pass. The PC version was obviously a console port and the controls felt clunky. It was more fun on a projector screen with an Xbox controller than on a laptop. It might have been more fun on a desktop with a big screen and a decent gaming mouse, but I can't be bothered to maintain one.
It takes a while to download games, but all of the other vaguely recent games I own are from online stores as well (okay, they're all from gog.com) and have the same download issue. It's a bit better on the Xbox because a lot of the big games let you play them before the download is finished - they organise the download so data files for things you only need later in the game are towards the end so you may only need 10-20GBs of a 70GB game before you can start.
I haven't played many non-console games since I got it (though I am still addicted to Creeper World 3 [knucklecracker.com], which is probably the game that I have spent the most total time playing of all games that I've ever played and would suck with a gamepad - I feel slightly bad because the author game me a free copy when he had a promotion to buy 1-3 together and I emailed to ask if there was a discount if you'd already bought 1 and 2 separately).
Amusingly, new Disney DVDs have a 'feature' called something like Disney Instant Play, where they start in the film and you have to hit the menu button to see the menu. After 20 years, they figured out that the main thing people want to do when they insert a DVD into a player is watch a film.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday January 22 2020, @12:22PM
I hear ya, on some points. Yeah, it's cheap enough to "just have" but I avoid subscriptions like the plague. Even my phone/Internet is on a month-to-month contract, so I can just cancel it any time I like.
"It's a computer that I can't do work on."
I have never stopped gaming to do work that wasn't absolutely necessary (e.g. emergency). I just close my email client and browser, at worst, if I'm distracted. To be honest, it's quite nice to flick between gaming and browsing. Maybe this is just a working practice
"Games on it don't ever need tweaking for my GPU. There is one configuration and it works."
I have never tweaked a game for my GPU. I choose, say, Medium, High, Ultra, and I'm done. I don't even update my graphics drivers. Everything on my Steam account "just works" including all the Assassin's Creeds, GTA V, etc. I can't imagine why you'd need to faff with those things. I spend more time turning off the damn game music than anything else.
My gaming laptop plugs into my projector. And works on a plane. It's just a high-end laptop, really, but it runs everything I need, including all the work stuff. Which I consider a plus. BTW My TV is a RPi with a DVB hat, and a large microSD card in it. It's literally my only TV, and is plugged into the projector but can stream anything (live TV, recorded, saved movies, etc.) to the laptop, my phone, Kodi, etc. It took me an hour to build. I haven't played with the config in 3 years of using it exclusively, except to add another RPi with another TV hat in order to simultaneously record/stream 2, 3, 4 channels via SAT>IP (depending on whether I use the 2 RPi's with hats, an extra DVB-T USB stick with dual-tuners, or an DVB-S stick I have that picks up satellite channels).
"I never have to do any tweaking for the console to make it work."
I can't remember the last time I changed anything on my laptop just to make a game work. It *might* be when GfW live died and Toy Soldiers stopped working on my previous Windows XP laptop. I am not joking. I got the DirectX and GfW working on an unsupported OS enough to play Toy Soldiers. Then I moved to 7 a year or so later.
"I haven't owned a desktop for ages and gaming on a laptop isn't the best experience. If I were to get a decent gaming desktop, it would cost an order of magnitude more than the console."
I paid £800 for my gaming laptop, and it was an old model when I bought it 8 years ago. It's about time for a replacement. You can spend £500 on a console easy. A gaming laptop, however, does *everything*. One device does the work of a dozen other devices... it's my TV, my games console, my movie theatre, my work machine, my virtual machine host, my programming environment (for personal projects), my travel machine (watching movies, etc. on a plane), etc. If it's not for you, okay, but I don't get people's hatred of gaming laptops.
"Console games still often support single-device multiplayer."
People come to my house for video games nights. I have a gaming laptop and a Pi4. That's it. Those people have every console known to man among them. But they come to me for all the games and playing on the bigscreen, with XBox wireless controllers, Wiimotes (used for lightgun games), G27 steering wheels, retro arcade cabinet, party games and bigger games (when the girls get bored and the guys get left to play!) etc. etc.
I can't say that my experience is your own. I'm looking at a new gaming laptop now. I'm playing to go straight to one capable of playing HL:Alyx, in fact. And I'll play it alone, or on the big screen in a party of people. I have a small list of games on my Steam that are in the "8 year old laptop struggles a little with these" category, which I look forward to enjoying properly. And my "gaming" hardware so far has cost me less than my TV licence. It'll cost me about £1500 to get a top-line one, and probably more for the actual VR headset, etc. (which I won't be buying until I know Alyx is a success)... but I will then literally live with that machine almost 24 hours a day for years - for work, play and holiday.
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Tuesday January 21 2020, @02:56PM (1 child)
Ghost Of Christmas Future Taunts Children With Visions Of PlayStation 5 [theonion.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:20PM
They got really close with that one. Blu-ray discs, PSVR, 50-100 concurrent players, Star Wars 9, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @06:43PM
Come on, now. "Leaks" like this come up on /v/ every single day.
What makes this particular one special?
Seriously, what proof do we have that any word of this is valid? Why am I getting random 4chan rumors as "news"?