PlayStation 5

Third party publishers will probably still have units there to demo their next gen games.

They gave E3 to MS last year and MS did very little with it.

Also as exciting as the new hardware is gonna be, Nintendo is gonna show off BotW2 most likely and that will monopolize a lot of the talk of the journalists considering how gaga they went for the first.

Right, and a lot of the talk is that the ESA and Sony are at odds. This is as much about that as it is about Sony controlling the message, etc.

@Ginger_Yellow, unless you have data I don’t, the Ninja thing for Microsoft hasn’t actually been that big a deal along with the other Mixer people. The last data said that was a mistake.

He lost 12 million viewers by switching. You also can’t give him a PS5 and expect him to play it when he’s being paid to play games on Microsoft’s own platform and will be playing Microsoft’s console at the same time.

@Brad_Grenz is right that Microsoft blew it last year. No Sony and Microsoft may as well not have been at E3 given the games they showed. This year might be different, though. Depends what they have that’s ready by then.

But they gave us Keanu.

Ninja was just a name I plucked out of the air. I’d forgotten about the Mixer thing until after I posted, so probably not a great choice in retrospect, but I wasn’t really talking about that kind of deal, just the usual marketing thing of giving popular streamers early access to games/hardware and/or paying them to say nice things about them. I was thinking about him (or whoever the other big non-Nazi sympathiser streamers are these days) playing PS5 on Twitch. How many people (especially kids) read/watch E3 coverage as opposed to following streamers? And, equally important, how many of the people watching E3 coverage would watch a Sony event as well?

There are also ways to be at E3 without formally being at E3. You can do the press conference without a floor presence. Or you can get your “exclusives” in other publishers’ press conferences and booths.

I have 3 theories

  1. They are massaging the message until it will shine like a supernova
  2. They may even have some bad news to deliver and don’t know how to deliver then yet
  3. Don’t want microsoft to know stuff in advance

I wonder if they are hoping for a “You can trade games by handing your friend the disc” opportunity again.

Yeah it could be argued Microsoft isn’t really at E3 anymore, just during. Last year they did all their stuff from the Microsoft Theater which they own.

is interesting that we still move brains around instead of information

maybe Sony is post-Analogical and only need a HTTP powered server to post some HTML and some JPEGS or perhaps stream a MPEG

There’s some good discussion of this on today’s Bombcast, BTW, with Jeff putting it in th context of the corporate reorganisation.

I hope to carry that image with me to my grave. Heh. It was pretty brilliant.

Is it possible Sony just doesn’t have anything to show yet?

They have tons to show, but they’ll probably do it next month at a PlayStation 5 unveiling event. I think skipping E3 is mostly about Sony’s frustration with the ESA’s mismanagement.

Microsoft does there big big E3 press conference but that’s using their own theater. Even they don’t have much of a presence directly on the show floor either.

I’m sad Sony aren’t going. Not because I think it’s a bad decision for them (I don’t see it as good or bad), but because E3 is a fun week, and I will be sad if it declines and more of the industry declines to show up. Even Microsoft isn’t really TECHNICALLY at E3, as their conference and “show floor” take place at their theater across the street.

One of my favourite things about E3 week, is that it’s a period where basically the entire industry’s creative and business braintrust is in the same place, which makes for lots of great podcasts, videos, and panel discussions. Giant Bomb especially, has a panoply of amazing guests all that week, who are only all there at the same time because of E3. That’ll go away if everyone just hosts their own events.

And E3 itself is fun to watch. It’s fun to watch the conferences, and see what goofy or cringeworthy nonsense will go on. It’s fun to get a concentrated blast of reveals. It’s fun to idly jaw about who “won” the show, and read an endless stream of reports from people playing all of the new games on the floor or behind closed doors.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-14/sony-is-struggling-with-playstation-5-price-due-to-costly-parts

I suspect Microsoft is having the same problems. I have a feeling this generation is going to start at $499.

Yeah, I can’t imagine it being anything less. And I guess to be fair, that’s like half the price of a new smartphone these days. :)

What a shock. They want an 8 core full desktop class CPU, high end GPU with hardware raytracing. A custom high end SSD, and a bunch of GDDR6 memmory…that equals a phat price tag.

Everyone’ll be streaming to their Chromebooks soon anyway.

Most of the components for the console have been locked down, the people said, including the cooling system, which is unusually expensive at a few dollars per unit. Typically, companies would spend less than a dollar, but Sony opted to lavish more on making sure heat dissipation from the powerful chips housed inside the console isn’t an issue.

This is good news at least.