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SONY & APPLE: A TALE OF TWO PRESENTATIONS - by Mr Biffo

8/9/2016

23 Comments

 
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Yesterday was a big day for people who love slightly dull presentations. First up: Apple's annual festival of self congratulation.

It opened like a beautiful flower (albeit one of those ones that give off the stench of rotting meat) with an ill-considered sketch featuring Apple boss Tim "No Steve Jobs" Cook and James "Big in America" Corden.

As he took to the stage following the clip, Cook - looking rather too pleased with himself - told us that there'd be brand new episodes of Corden's Carpool Karaoke arriving on iTunes. Cook paused after the announcement, primed for applause. Instead, he was hit in the face with a tumbleweed.

Which is odd, as by all accounts America has clutched Corden to its bosom. Perhaps there were more British journalists in the audience than Cook had counted on.
SHIGS
Fortunately, this was countered by a much more warmly received appearance from Shigeru Miyamoto. He bravely - but unwisely - attempted his introduction in English, before leaving it to a translator to tell us that Mario is coming to iOS, in a pay-one-fee endless runner. Cook asserted that the Apple Store has more than half a million games on it... as if such a policy of quantity over quality was a good thing.

​Then we got some guff about Apple's education policy, collaborative working, yadda yada yadda, new watch, new iPhone - with "courageous" lack of headphone jack, equating Apple's pointless design decision to the selflessness of, say, a firefighter who runs into a burning pharmacy to rescue a fox - lots of corporate puffery, and a climax which saw James Corden return to the stage to do a big poo in a vase.

It was a cosplay version of the sort of presentation Apple has been giving for years - complete with a series of quasi-sexy product demonstrations voiced by Apple's design chief, Sir Jonny Ive, that were almost beyond parody ("Sir Jonny I've Got an Erection" more like).

Then this happened: Sony's "PlayStation Meeting", which gave us the news that there are two new PlayStation 4s on the way - the Slim and the Pro (sounds like a Charlie Chaplin movie) - which arrive this month and in November, respectively.​
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PRO BONO
What can the PlayStation Pro do? It can do 4K video, and it can do high-def textures or something, and it can do HDR, whatever that is.

I'm only familiar with HDR, because it's that thing that happens on my iPhone when I take a photo, and leave my finger on the shutter button slightly too long. 

Basically - for those of you who are technophobes like myself - it will make games look, y'know, a bit better. It's something to do with the lighting and colours. We'll get brighter explosions, we were told - which gives you pretty much everything you need to know about the current state of gaming.

But wait: a software upgrade for existing PS4s will also give them HDR visuals, just not the 4K, or the HD textures. All PS4 games will run on all PS4s - they'll just look slightly nicer on the Pro. Basically, this is Sony adopting the same model as Apple: incremental upgrades to existing technology, rather than things taking a quantum leap forwards every five or so years.
​
Unfortunately, HDR is precisely the sort of vague and difficult-to-get nonsense that most people don't care about - demonstrating the huge gulf between tech people and normal people. It also didn't help that anybody watching the event online - as I was - couldn't really tell the difference between the before and after clips showing PS4 games with and without HDR.

It was as if Apple had chosen to show off their new iPhone 7 by hiding it under a sheet of gauze, and forcing a physicist - who had just woken up from a four-year coma - to describe it.

UNSPOKEN WHAT?
The unspoken implication was that this is all happening now because you'll sort of need one to get the best out of PlayStation VR - which drops next month, in case you'd forgotten (and who could blame you?). However, when PlayStation CEO Andrew House and his cronies (let's call them The Bungalows) came to PSVR, they just sort of mumbled and shuffled their feet, and couldn't move on fast enough.

There's almost a sense from Sony that they're regretting ever announcing the thing. It's like when you arrange a dinner party in March, and by the time it comes around in October you've gone off the idea.

Indeed, the most startling thing about Sony's "meeting" was the sheer awkwardness of those it got to present the demonstration. House displayed such a lack of passion and conviction it's a wonder he hasn't been re-dubbed Andrew Semi-Detached.

​His thousand yard stare and permanent frown lent him the demeanour of a man who... well... a man who was about to host a dinner party to which he'd invited Idi Amin, Robespierre and Kanye West.

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RAMBO
Sony tried hard to ram home the message that the Pro is an addition to its PlayStation line-up, rather than a replacement, but it was a rather hollow message, and hard to get too excited about anything Sony had to say (though all of that might've been down to the sheer lack of energy on stage).

Maybe they did talk big about PlayStation VR, and I just missed it because my attention had drifted away.

The event concluded with a showreel of upcoming PlayStation games, but all it did was highlight the depressing reality that almost all mainstream games now look like versions of one another; photorealism, all these endless attempts to bridge the Uncanny Valley, has pretty much killed real artistic imagination. It's painting with a calculator, rather than a brush.

Call of Duty blended into Mass Effect blended into Rise of the Tomb Raider blended into that new jungle game with robot dinosaurs that looks a bit like Uncharted and Rise of the Tomb Raider but with Robot Dinosaurs which looked a bit like the dinosaurs in No Man's Sky - but robots.

Again, the whole thing just felt tired, and a long, long way from the Sony of the past, which understood its branding, understood how to get people excited about its products without hitting them over the head with numbers and tech-speak. It's as if gaming is moving backwards, after decades of it becoming something everyone could grasp and understand - and want to be a part of.

Of course, the real message of both the Sony and Apple presentations is that technology has hit a glass ceiling. The big leaps forward - 3D games, HD, touchscreen - have all happened. There are no more easy-to-understand, big shifts left to make, to get people excited.

​Well, there's VR, but even with just over a month to go until PSVR arrives, Sony appear to be doing their level best to pretend that isn't happening.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
​PLAYSTATION VR: WHERE'S ALL THE HYPE? - BY MR BIFFO
GONNA MAKE YOUR OLD GAMES NEW: TEN OLD GAMES WHICH NEED TO BE BROUGHT BACK
​
WHICH GAMES CONSOLE HAD THE BEST LOGO?
23 Comments
Monkey Head
8/9/2016 10:09:06 am

Yeh, I'm not a Corden fan. Good article.

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Jimmy Wilson
8/9/2016 10:10:54 am

The PS4 Pro was completely underwhelming. I guess it's difficult to sell the benefits to people through when broadcasting on channels and hardware that's not capable of actually conveying those benefits.

I'm not really convinced by the whole 4K thing. I think I would rather see higher framerates, or more bells and whistles at 1080p than a barely perceptible resolution boost. I have a 4K TV, but unless I'm mistaken, without a 4K enabled device to plug into it there's no way for me to even preview what the 4K enabled games look like?

Ohh man!

Well done on hitting the £350 price point though.

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neil
8/9/2016 10:38:05 am

Are the manufacturers convinced by the 4k thing when they already have advertising around the pitch of whatever football match was on the telly the other day.

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Antony Adler
8/9/2016 12:32:45 pm

You could preview them by watching 4k streams / vids of what they'll look like. For the record, I've got a lovely 4k TV and when the sources are good, you can very much tell that it's an upgrade on 1080p !

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Jimmy Wilson
8/9/2016 01:01:10 pm

Watch the streams through which device though? The TV has Netflix and YouTube built in but none seem to have 4K videos available.

I don't really care that much tbh. The TV was at the right price point, 4K didn't really factor into it.

MattL
9/9/2016 12:43:19 am

Higher frame-rates for games, yes, but in terms of media consumption live-action films look awful at higher frame-rates.

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Kara Van Park
8/9/2016 12:31:53 pm

Sony are ushering in the Pro like a married man moving in a blonde 19 year old and assuring his bewildered wife and kids he'll still love them just as much and could they make 'Mommy mkII' feel welcome

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Random Reviewer
9/9/2016 09:47:45 pm

Spot on. The squirm is strong in this one.

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Stelios
8/9/2016 12:32:53 pm

Hardware companies seem to be rolling out the HDR chestnut over and over again every few years, as if their pre-written scripts at these presentations have big gaps in them with 'INSERT BEWILDERING TECHNICAL GUFF HERE' cause they have nothing else to say?

Valve's HL2: Lost Coast demo of 2005 was created to show off HDR lighting, and it had little speech bubbles spread around the map which gave you a developer explanation of what the new technology did. So is Sony boasting about how they've finally managed to use a minor technology that's already been on the PC for at least 11 years? Wow, really makes me want to shell out for a PS4.

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Cthulhu Steev
8/9/2016 03:39:44 pm

Well I think that's the point, you have a complete misunderstanding of what HDR actually is, because it's not the lighting in that HL2 expansion.

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wunk
8/9/2016 12:52:10 pm

I'm a photographer, so I get the whole HDR techno gubbins. Sort of. The problem is it's something you just cannot appreciate unless you site down in front of said tech and use your own peepers. Looking at videos on the web is totally pointless. So the marketing bods have a touch time on their hands as there's nothing to *really* show.

In summary, games will look better. Will most people care, or even tell the difference? No. Will I be buying a PS4 Pro given I'm the sort who might actually appreciate it? Fuck no.

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TrevorDFarm
8/9/2016 01:08:12 pm

This is mostly conventional market segmentation, due in part to increasingly successful adoption of 4K television.

Previously, display upgrades have been catered for with the generation turnover in consoles, or small accommodations with existing hardware. XB360/PS3 releases were prepped for 720p/1080p, while widescreen was a hardware neutral 'feature' of the PS2 generation. 3D television didn't take off, but had been anticipated with PS3 hardware.

4K televisions are forming a very defined market segment though - buyers are typically top-spend buyers, perhaps cine-philes, but more often cost-indifferent purchasers looking to buy the 'best' product available. It may not have registered widely yet, but there is every indication that 4K screens are going to succeed where 3D tv didn't.

The PS4 - and the XBoxOne - are following this segmentation with the 'standard' product, and the one which can match this output. Like the first gen of HD, but unlike widescreen and to an extent 3D, this must have better hardware to deal with it. The appeal is for 'best-spec' buyers, who would look for a matching console. Neither manufacturer will want to leave this lucrative market empty, nor can they afford to have the other as the sole supplier of this product.

It is also occurring half way through the console generation cycle. Following market segmentation is the almost certainly the least-worst way to deal with this. I very much doubt Sony would like to be on an 'incremental improvement' cycle, they just have to do this now. (Microsoft are looking to disrupt this generation, so have other incentives.)

So my takeaways are:

- this generation cycle is far from over, so 4K must be accommodated sooner rather than later
- PS VR is an incidental benefit - other clues suggest it will be a peripheral with modest take up for ~2yrs
- this is NOT a shift to incremental console improvements for Sony

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MattL
9/9/2016 12:41:06 am

If they were interested in cinephiles, I think Sony would have included UHD Blu-ray compatibility. For the foreseeable future, that will be the best and easiest way to view 4K content in the best quality. Baffling that they left that out when they are also a studio that is trying to sell films on UHD discs and the much-cheaper new Xbox can play them.

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TrevorDFarm
9/9/2016 01:46:27 pm

Yes, it does stand out as an odd choice.

I would speculate that Sony see UHD as a small part of the mass market, even in comparison to 4K, and likely to be displaced by streaming altogether. Cinephiles aren't the bulk of the 4K or console buyer-base, but this has certainly left the XBO-S be one of the cheaper ways to get a UHD player.

MattL
9/9/2016 05:42:02 pm

Trevor, you're right, I'm sure eventually streaming will totally replace physical media - other than as a niche interest for collectors - but that is a long way off in terms of 4K. Putting aside slow internet speeds, the quality isn't comparable yet, just as HD streaming isn't as good as standard Blu-ray. What's so strange is that Sony are one of the companies behind the UHD Blu-ray format, and Sony Pictures are one of the first studios to release films for it. Why they wouldn't include the technology in the console to promote their content when earlier PlayStations helped popularise DVD and Blu-ray is just bizarre. Microsoft's new console is the cheapest way for anyone to get a UHD Blu-ray machine (about £100 cheaper than any stand-alone player).

It makes no sense at all; it was a golden opportunity and I think they've lost a lot of potential sales already simply by making this decision.

Clive Peppard
8/9/2016 02:16:02 pm

Corden... No

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wunk
8/9/2016 02:43:36 pm

Ha.

Bit of a tangent, but what was the turning point when Corden suddenly became a massive massive bellend? We all used to like him when he was in Gavin & Stacey. Didn't we? Didn't we?

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Nick
8/9/2016 08:46:56 pm

I think it was when he stopped acting and started being himself.

I know people find me unbearable when I'm myself.

Spiney O'Sullivan
8/9/2016 02:40:09 pm

I'm slightly disappointed that the American response to Corden was muted. Mainly because I was hoping they'd keep him.

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FatDave
8/9/2016 06:33:00 pm

If I was stuck with a last gen console and I had just bought a shiny new UHD tv then I'd probably buy it. But its not a worthwhile upgrade, it wont even make older games run like shit off a shovel.

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Crackerwax
8/9/2016 10:46:29 pm

So the PlayStation 4 Pro has beefier graphics processing but no UHD Blu-ray drive.

The Xbox One S has a little boost in processing power and a UHD Blu-ray drive but is only available in white.

What's going on here, is somebody trying to mess with my head? This is Sophie's Choice level head-messery here...

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Voodoo76
9/9/2016 03:20:13 pm

I think most people are missing a massive point. I personally couldn't give a shit about 4k, higher frame rates, faster, bigger numbers yawn, yawn, etc etc. I want new imaginative ways to play games, I want today's equivalent of Mario 64, which is 20 years old. Most games now are tired and boring, just hyped up mass produced shite bought by spoilt kids who don't know any better.

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Larry Bundy Jr link
10/9/2016 05:18:10 am

The problem about the PS4 Neo/Pro is the way it was hyped up, it was going to be the equivalent of the Xbox Scorpio, but released this year.

The fact they couldn't even be arsed to stick a 2tb HDD in it, like the XB1 S has, shows they've completely misjudged their audience with this one.

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