Sony Strikes Back with the PS4

and I love all things tech. And if you've been listening to the PlayStation series of episodes on tech Stuff, you've heard me talk about the birth of the console from the moment that Ken Kutaragi, who was a Sony engineer at first and then rose to the head of Sony Computer Entertainment, he first started working on the project in secret, even two members of Sony's own board of directors, and I went all the way up to when Ken

Kutaragi left the company in two thousand seven. In large part he would totally cut ties in, but that was after the PlayStation three had kind of a lackluster debut. It didn't go as well as the company had expected. In this episode, my plan is I'm going to finish off the PS three's story, then we're gonna talk about the PS four, and we'll conclude with the little bit of information we have about the upcoming PS five, because as of the recording of this podcast, that console has

yet to come out. So let's get started, and we're going to backtrack just a touch to talk about the service that Sony launched in two thousand six, so that's one year before the father of the PlayStation would leave the company. This was the same year that the PlayStation three came out after a couple of delays. That was another reason why ken Kutaragi was sort of put into

the back seat. It's called the PlayStation Network, and this is an online service, something similar to Microsoft's Xbox Live service. Gamers can connect to the network for downloadable content and services like messaging. Xbox Live had a couple of tiers of service. There was a free tier called Xbox Live Silver, which supported some features but not stuff like online gameplay, So if you wanted to play cooperatively or competitively online, you needed to pay for a subscription to Xbox Live Gold.

The PlayStation Network was advertised as just being free of charge. You wouldn't have to pay extra for the services, and that would allow for online play. However, when it launched, the PlayStation Network had several features that only had limited support, indicating that even at this stage, the online capabilities of the console were more of a reaction to Microsoft rather than a carefully designed Sony project. And we're gonna talk a lot more about the PlayStation network a little bit

later in this episode. So one thing that was still going on even as late as two thousand seven, when Ken Kutaragi would leave the company, was that Sony was still producing the PlayStation two. That console originally debuted way back in two thousand. The p S three came out in two thousand six, and Sony would keep making the PS two until two thousand and twelve, essentially just before

Sony would unveil the PS four. That's the point when manufacturing facilities finally stopped rolling off freshly built PS two consoles from the assembly lines. So even as I wrap up the PS three story, we should keep in mind that the PS two's tail wasn't over yet either. It kept going strong, And just because the PS three had a rocky start doesn't mean Sony would abandon that console quickly either. Justice Sony had supported the original PlayStation and the PS two for a decade or longer, so too

would it support the PS three. One thing I didn't touch on in the last episode has to do with people finding a good use for the cell processor. That's the processor that Sony, Teshiba, and IBM a k A s t I developed together for the p S three specifically, And if you remember from my last episode about the PlayStation, I mentioned Kutaragi intended the cell microprocessor architecture to service

the foundation for lots of other Sony products. Well, that didn't really happen in a big way, but other groups found uses for the tech that went well outside the realm of video games. This story is all about how researchers managed to cluge together a network of PlayStation consoles to act as a sort of cluster computer that could perform calculations at such a high rate that it was like having access to a genuine supercomputer. And this idea

wasn't a new one. Folks had tried doing it even back in the old PS two days with that console's Emotion Engine processor. Sony had released a kit that allowed developers to install Linux, that's an operating system on the PS two for the purposes of coding games, But that meant that you could code lots of other stuff too, and engineers at the National Center for super Computing Applications or in c s A tried to turn a bunch of PS two game systems into a computing cluster. See,

supercomputers are incredibly expensive to make. Even renting time on a supercomputer is pricing, and there are a lot of different research projects that could benefit from having access to that sort of processing power. Using PlayStation two consoles, which were insanely cheap in comparison to a supercomputer, would be

an amazing workaround. But the researchers found that the PS two wasn't really suited for that kind of work, and they frequently encountered problems, particularly with system memory, that made the PS two sort of a non viable option. But then the PS three came along and the story changed. The initial PS three's seemed ideal for the supercomputer treatment. It was easier to load Linux on them, they didn't

have the same memory issues. Soon you had research organizations around the world sweeping up PS three consoles, not to play games, but in order to run complex processes such as simulations about black holes. I'm not kidding. They really were used to do this. That's what the University of

Massachusetts Dartmouth researcher garov Kana did. He worked for several weeks developing the code that would allow him to network together multiple PS three's and use them like a supercomputer in order to run scientific calculations related to black hole research. That is some seriously cool tech. Ultimately, he was able to connect one hundred seventy six PS three consoles to act like a supercomputer, gaining access to computational processing power.

This team wouldn't otherwise never had access to it. Just black hole research isn't one of those areas that gets tons of funding thrown at it, so they have to make a little money go a long way, and this was one of the ways they were able to do it. And he wasn't the only one doing this. Not only were other research facilities trying out similar approaches. The United States military was as well. The Air Force Research Laboratory built one of the largest networks of PS threes in

a project called Condor Cluster. But this project launched in two thousand nine. That was right around the same time Sony was making some decisions that made everything much more difficult if you wanted to make a computer cluster LPs three's see like other PlayStation consoles, Sony would release several updated models of the p S three, and the newer versions were typically slimmer and smaller, and sometimes had new features, or in a few cases, sometimes they got rid of

old features that Sony no longer wanted to support. The newer PIECEPS three models, the ones that were coming onto store shelves around the time that Condor Cluster was getting started, wouldn't let you load Linux on them the way the old ones did. Sony had removed that capability, and even the old consoles were affected if they had been connected to Sony's online services because the company had released a firmware update that nullified the Linux solution on those old consoles.

So when a project like Condor Cluster comes along, everyone working on it was left searching for older PS three consoles that had not been updated. They hadn't had that firmware update installed on them. Sony had a warehouse of a pretty hefty collection of older PS three's that were sitting in Chicago, Illinois, and initially the company's intention was to recall all those old consoles. They weren't going to

let them go onto the market at all. Representatives from the US Air Force had to actually convince executives at Sony to sell off those old consoles to Condor Cluster, rather than just recalling them. Apparently it took a few

phone calls and meetings to make this happen. Now, ultimately, Condor Cluster did take off pun intended, and it did so with one thousand, seven hundred sixty PlayStation three consoles, so ten times the number that were used to research black holes, and these were all wired together to form the backbone or the Condor Cluster system. The arefore stated that the intended uses for the system included radar enhancement,

AI research, and satellite image recognition processes. It was also used, at least reportedly to analyze images collected by surveillance drones. So um, this isn't a period of American history that gets kind of dicey, especially when it talks about, you know,

drone surveillance and and potentially attack drones. But anyway, at the time of the systems unveiling, it was estimated to be the third most powerful supercomputer in the world, although other reports disputed that and said it was much further down the list, ranking it around number thirty five for fastest supercomputers. Though I guess you could also make an argument that powerful and fast are two different metrics, so it really just depends on what they were actually measuring,

and neither of the press releases I found got into specifics. Anyway, I should use the past tense for Condor Cluster because that project ended around two thousand fifteen. By that time, other computing model power capabilities were outstripping what seventred or so PS three's could do. The Air Force would donate some of the p S three's to other research projects,

and then they sold off the rest. And there are some projects that still use PS three's to help run processes, but a lot of those projects have then moved on to different approaches in processing or moved operations into the cloud for example. Just turned out that the rest of computing power kind of caught up and then surpassed the PS three, making it less useful. In two thousand seven, the same year that kN Kutaragi would leave Sony, the company introduced the PlayStation I periph role for the p

S three. Now you might remember that when I was talking about the PS two that the company experimented with a webcam PERIPH role called Eye Toy. Well, in many ways, the PlayStation I was the next generation of that webcam technology. It could capture video at a higher frame rate, which means more frames per second that gives you a much more smooth video quality, and also had a higher resolution than the earlier Eye Toy. It also had a more

sophisticated microphone than the earlier Eye Toy. And on the software side, Sony included facial recognition support, which the company claimed could only recognize faces and expressions, but also recognize the orientation of a face, such as where you are looking at any given time, kind of like a very primitive version of eye tracking technologies. One year after Kutaragi left,

so we're talking around two thousand eight. At this point, Sony would release the dual Shock three controller, which officially replaced the six axis controller. The dual Shock three was

essentially a six axis controller with rumble motors. So if you listen to the last episode in this series, you'll remember Sony released the six axis itself was a last minute replacement for a boomerang shaped controller that was never released, but they released it without a vibrating motor because there was this big intellectual property lawsuit that was leveled against Sony.

But by two thousand and eight that lawsuit had been settled, and so the little vibrating motors were back in the controllers, restoring haptic feedback to the PlayStation line. And while we're on the subject of controllers, Sony would introduce a new type of controller in two thousand nine. It's the Move controller, which looks a bit like a handheld microphone or maybe a flashlight. At the end of the device is a small globe which can light up many different colors thanks

to an LED on the end of the gadget. It's meant to work with the PlayStation I the webcam that I had mentioned earlier, So the PlayStation I could detect the globe at the end of a Move controller and track it in three dimensions, so not just up, down, and left right with respect to the view of the camera, but also closer or further away from the camera, because it could detect how the size of the globe was changing, whether or not it was coming closer to the camera

further away. In addition, the Move has a pair of sensors in it inside the controller itself that tracked changes in movements, so it could measure stuff like a change in the angle it was held or in rotation, and I could dedicate an entire episode to all the sensors and technologies that make the Move controller work, but that's gonna wait for a later date. We're going to stick to the consoles for now. So in addition to this wand like controller, Sony also released a companion controller called

de PlayStation Move Navigation Controller. You would hold this one in your other hand, presumably you would hold the Move controller in your dominant hand, and the navigation controller has buttons and a thumbstick on it to give players and game developers more options when it comes to game interface

and controls. The Move was in many ways a response to Nintendo Wee's success that we had launched in two thousand six, and the novel motion based control system was an enormous breakout hit among an audience that traditionally wasn't really into video games. So these were all the casual gamers and the non gamers who went crazy for the Wii.

Microsoft would have its own gesture based motion control system to connect, but that would launch a year after PlayStation Move, so Sony got the jump on Microsoft even though they were trailing behind Nintendo. The Move would also play a part in a future VR system for the PS four, but I'll get to that in just a moment. In the meantime, let's take a quick break. At the three conference, Sony announced it was launching an online service called PlayStation Plus,

built on top of the PlayStation network. PlayStation Plus introduced a subscription based element to Sony's online platform. The subscription would give gamers access to free content each month, or really not free content, is rather content that was included in the subscription fee each month because you were paying for this stuff, but that included game titles. So let's say you'd picked up a PS three, but you never

got around to buying that one launch title. Well, there was a chance that Sony might make that very game available for download one month on the PlayStation Plus program, and you could just snag it. Then you wouldn't have to buy it yourself. You just get that as part of the subscription service. All it took in return was that monthly subscription, and when a debut, it cost forty nine cents for a year of service in the US. Now,

some months you'd say, Wow, this is incredible. I got a great game or a couple of games on this month's PlayStation Plus. Some months you'd say, wow, I never want to play that game. Ever, but I guess I've got it now. Same thing is true with Microsoft's service. By the way, it's not like Sony's alone in this.

A year later, in two thousand and eleven, the PlayStation network was the target of an intrusive AC, meaning an unauthorized person or group of persons managed to penetrate Sony's network security, and they gained access to an enormous amount of information, including the personal data of around seventy five million PlayStation network users. The attacks started around April seventeen,

two thousand eleven. Sony would shut down the network on April twenty so, three days later, and it would remain offline a total of twenty three days, the longest outage in the network's history. Making matters worse was that Sony admitted that while credit card information was encrypted, other personal identifying information wasn't, which meant the hackers potentially had access to millions of users personal information in plain text data. As for who committed the hack today, that still remains

a big mystery. According to Sony, the company had reason to believe that the people connected with online activist group Anonymous were responsible, but Anonymous denied responsibility. However, This is incredibly tricky because Anonymous is a largely decentralized organization. In fact, calling it an organization might be a little bit um misleading because Anonymous is historically more like a group of hackers and activists, anarchists and troublemakers who share some but

not all, points of view. So there's not even a unifying ethos or philosophy and Anonymous um other than you know, big companies and big organizations shouldn't have that much control over everybody. That's generally a kind of unifying theme, but there's a lot of splintering within that group. At the time, the general wisdom was that Anonymous had a motive to hack Sony because the company had recently filed a massive lawsuit against a packer named George Hotts a k a.

Geo hots. He had found a way to alter a PlayStation three so that it would play pirated or unauthorized software, and then he published how to do it, and Anonymous

was largely on the side of the hacker. However, the entire matter had been settled out of court by the time the PlayStation network hack happened, and as far as I can tell, no one has ever been positively identified as truly being responsible for that hack, so that person's identity remains a mystery, or those persons identities because it

could be multiple people. The hack and corresponding data leak would prompt the U S Government to call upon Sony executives to explain what the company would do for all those who were affected by the breach, and Sony arranged to offer identity theft protection policies essentially insurance policies against identity theft, with a company called all Clear i D to everyone affected. The hack set Sony back up pretty any. The estimates on losses went around the hundred and seventy

million dollar range, which is a princely sum. Indeed, and the US was not the only country to call Sony to task for this. The UK did as well as did other places. Now, before we move on to talk about the PS four, I do want to say that several predictions made by Sony executives, such as Kutaragi's replacement Katsu Horai, ended up being true. Harai said in interviews that while developing for the PS three was definitely complicated, that it really was hard to make great games for

the p S three. He said it would lead to really incredible games as long as developers took the time to learn how to do it now. I mentioned in the last episode that if you do a side by side of the first Uncharted game and Uncharted three, both of which were developed four and debuted on the PlayStation three, you'll see a world of difference despite the fact that they're but two games that are playing on the exact same hardware. The same is true for the last huge

title to come out on the p S three. That would be the last of us. So yeah, the PS three had a pretty rocky start, and a lot of gamers and game developers and game journalists criticized Sony for putting out an expensive console, missing a launch date in the process, and it was hard to code for than other systems, and they all said, or not all, but many of them said, this is a recipe for them

to fail. However, in the long run, the PS three would prove to be a very strong system and it would sell enough units to rest second place away from Microsoft in the console wars. For the seventh generation of consoles, Nintendo's we was still in a league of its own.

It was still in first place with a bullet, but Sony PlayStation three would take second place, and this is despite the fact that the uh the Xbox three sixty had a heads art of like half a year or more really over the PS three, So that that's food for thought right there. It also helps that Sony supported the PS three for more than a decade. Now for

the PS four, the company would serve again. Now, I don't know how much input Kutaragi had on the development of the PS four, He surely was working on it by the time he decided to leave the company. However, game systems are in development for years before they debut, and the PS four would launch in North America in

two thousand and thirteen, so six years after Kutaragi left. Now, interestingly, it wouldn't debut in Japan until early two thousand and fourteen, so it might have been because of PS three sales in Japan and Sony you didn't want to hurt a good thing. Now, I would imagine that had Kutaragi had a large influence in the development of the PS four, it would have taken further steps down the same path

that the PS three had established. But instead, the p S four's architecture was much more like a standard personal computer. In fact, it would be extremely similar to the architecture used in Microsoft's Xbox one. And here's where, yet again I complain about Microsoft's naming conventions. The Blaze station is sensible because Sony just adds a higher number with each generation,

so it's very easy to talk about them. Meanwhile, over at Microsoft we get Xbox, the Xbox three, six D, the Xbox one, the Xbox Series X. Knock it off, Microsoft, There's no way to meaningfully talk about generations of consoles with these sort of names. And I say that as someone who tends to play more Microsoft consoles than Sony consoles. Get your act together, all right? Also, what happened to Windows nine? Why don't we go from eight to ten? Anyway,

this isn't an episode about Microsoft. I'll get back to the Sony now. This design decision was deliberate by so many engineers and executives. The company used components manufactured by Microprocessor Company a m D. So under the hood, the PS four is similar to a typical personal computer, but during development it did have a more mysterious code name at least orbis. Now what this means in a practical sense is that developing games for the PS four was

more straightforward. It was easier than developing them for the PS three and taking full advantage of the PS three's capabilities. It was also easier to develop a game for multiple platforms because the differences between the PS four and the Xbox One weren't so great that it would be an

enormous strain on a game development company. So for companies that were looking to maximize their sales by reaching as many gamers as possible, it was much easier to port a title over from one platform to another in this generation.

On the downside, this would mean that there would be fewer features that really distinguished the PS four from its chief competitor, and it's also why the research organizations that have been using PS three consoles didn't show any interest in using the PS four in the same way, because the new console didn't offer any substantial benefits over a standard PC. So if you wanted to link a bunch of machines together, you would just go out and buy

regular computers. There was no real advantage with the PS four. Now, the PS four is Sony's contribution to the eighth generation of video game consoles. Nintendo's original console in this generation was the WEU, but Nintendo would actually have two consoles in this generation, the second one being the Nintendo Switch. Microsoft's entrant is, of course, the Xbox One. The PS four was the second console to debut in that particular

generation of games. It followed the WEU, but it came out a week ahead of Microsoft's Xbox One, and this generation is perhaps the most difficult to define from a distinguishing characteristics perspective. The new consoles were not a huge departure from their seventh generation counterparts, apart from the fact that Sony chose to go with a more straightforward microprocessor architecture.

The PS four and the Xbox One were undeniably more powerful than their predecessors, but otherwise it's kind of hard to point out like big defining features for these consoles.

Over the course of their production life cycles, which by the way, is still ongoing as of the recording of this podcast, both Sony and Microsoft would release updated versions of their consoles then not only slim things down, which was typical we've often seen, you know, later versions of the same console just get smaller and more compact, but they also up the anti on performance. So in some ways, this makes the eighth generation of consoles more like traditional PCs,

except you can't really do those upgrades yourself. You can't break open a PlayStation for or an Xbox One and swap out components. I mean you could, but you're not supposed to. You have to purchase a whole new console to benefit from the enhancements unless you really know what you're doing and you don't mind the fact that you avoided all warranties and potentially set yourself up for heartbreak if if games start relying on code that detect if

if a console has been altered anyway. This includes these enhancements include the ability to send four K resolution graphics to a compatible television. Both Sony and Microsoft would launch updated consoles capable of doing that, but the launch versions the original PS four and the original Xbox One did not have four K capability, which means both my PS

four and my Xbox one are totally outdated. I have the original versions of both of those, so I can't run four K resolution stuff from those consoles to a television, But that's okay because I also don't have a four K TV, so I wouldn't be able to see it anyway. Anyway, back to the timeline. Sony gave some early details on the PS four at a special press of in New York City in early and at that event they didn't

actually show off the console. They rather gave some overall specs on what it had going on, and a big part of that actually had to do with its new controller, the dual Shock four. All Right, So I've talked a lot about dual shock controllers in this series. So what sets the four apart from the earlier controllers. Well, for one thing, Sony built in some of the features found in stuff like the move controllers. The dual Shock four

has motion detection sensors in it. It also has a capacity of touch pad on the controller itself, mounted towards the front of the controller in between the two thumbsticks. And just a quick reminder that capacity of touch screens have an electric field that's essentially running underneath the screen, and we humans are conductive, So if we touch a surface like that with our bare skin, we change the nature of that electric field because some of the electric

current can flow into us. The capacitive touch screen devices detect the point of contact doing this there's like a grid pattern underneath it, and the disturbance of that pattern is what quote unquote tells a machine where you touched a touch pad surface, and then you've got a processor and you've got some software that determines what that actually

means within the context of an application. So it might be like on a touch screen smartphone that when you touch something it activates a particular program, right, or if it's a gesture like a swipe, it might mean let's move to the next photograph or whatever. The dual CHUCK four also has a three and a half millimeter headphone jack, and honestly, I almost forgot what those are because phones have been dropping support for them for the last few years.

I'm just really exaggerating. My computer, my laptop has a three and a half millimeter headphone jack, but it's just a regular headphone jack. It also connects to PS four's wirelessly via Bluetooth two point one. You could also have a hardwired connection if you bought a special you know, well not special, but a long enough cable for it.

The cables that came of the PS four were notoriously short, long enough for you to be able to charge your your controller, but that was about it unless you were going to have the console in your lap as you played. Sony and Microsoft would do something similar leading up to the launch in their respective eighth generation video game consoles. Both companies began to promote some stuff in their consoles

that fell outside the realm of video games. Both Sony and Microsoft position their consoles as kind of an entertainment and social networking center, uh, sort of a key component of a home theater system or computer system. So features like sharing stuff on social media, or watching live stream content, or creating live stream content, and accessing services like Netflix became a really big part in the promotional efforts both

for Microsoft and Sony. However, I will say Microsoft leaned into this way harder than Sony did, in fact, to the point where fans of video games began to criticize Microsoft for short changing games at events like E three, where the company seemed determined to talk about pretty much everything besides video games. One other thing that would set the PS four apart from the Xbox One, at least the original plan for the Xbox One had to do

with online connectivity. Sony made online connectivity and option for the PS four gamers were not required to have an online connection in order to play games. There would be no restrictions on playing secondhand games or sharing games with friends. Contrast that with the original plan for the Xbox One. That one was supposed to require a persistent internet connection, even if you just wanted to play a single player

game that had no online component to it. So you might want to settle in for a couple of hours

on a solo adventure. You got your game, there's no online component to the game, but then your internet connection goes bad, well, you would be out of luck if you were using an Xbox One, at least in its original concept form, and due to online copy protection, being able to share games or buy used ones and then play them on a console would be pretty much a no go because the system would be able to verify whether or not that game had been registered to that console,

and so gamers were really not happy about this direction that Microsoft was taking. There were some positive parts of this persistent online approach to but the negative ones were really apparent, and Sony would end up enjoying the benefits of not going down that same path. In fact, Sony's presentations often would contrast against Microsoft with the company playfully and gleefully claiming play as many used games on our

system as you like. Now, this isn't an Xbox series of episodes, but I do want to just say that Microsoft famously walked back their plans. They dropped the persistent online component before they launched the Xbox One, so they did change that between the announcement and the launch. But um, yeah, that's for a different episode anyway. Along with the console, Sony also introduced the next generation of PlayStation webcams. This time they finally dropped the eye naming convention for this one.

You know, they had the eye toy and the PlayStation I. This one was just the PlayStation camera. The hardware actually contains two cameras inside of it, which are used to help since depth similar to the way our eyes work, and it's through what's called parallax. So parallax actually refers to how an object looks different when you're when you

view it from different positions. And that's super intuitive, right, Like, if you look at something like a coffee mug from the side, then you can see the handle of the mug, right, it's just poking out. But then let's say you were to move so that the handle of the mug is behind the mug. From your point of view, the mug

would look differently to you, look like a smooth cup. Well, our eyes are obviously in slightly different positions on our heads right our left eye and our right eye are offset from one another, which means we're getting two different feeds of visual information, and each of those feeds is slightly different from the other one, and our brains combine these together to create our concept of what we're seeing, and that includes a sense of how far away something

is from us. This is, by the way, only one of the ways that we're able to sense depth. Parallax is one way. This is kind of what we talk about when you lose depth perception, like if you if you've lost an eye, or you're wearing an eyepatch or whatever, um you you have problems with depth perception because your ability to use parallax has gone. You no longer have

two streams of information coming in. But there are other things we use as well, like context clues, like environmental clues to kind of gauge how close or far things are. So it's not the only way, it's just a way.

The PlayStation camera uses parallax as well. It has those two camera lenses to pull in information, and then the system processes that information to get a sense of depth, even without tracking something like the size of a move controller's globe, which obviously is another way to detect depth, is just judging that relative size. The PlayStation camera could play a very important role in another PS four system, which we're gonna cover right after I take a break,

but before I get to that break. When the PS four debuted, it did so to great enthusiasm. After the first twenty four hours, Sony reported it had sold more than one million units and the product had launched in November. By the end of December, four point two million PlayStation four consoles were sold, so it was already a hit. Now I have more to say about the PS four and a bit about the PS five, but before I

get to that, let's take another quick break. Before the break, I tease that the PlayStation camera would be an important component in a new hardware system for the PS four. Another piece of that system was the move controller, so these were two already established pieces of hardware. The third would be a VR headset. Sony first acknowledged this at the game Developer Conference or g d C in two

thousand and fourteen, and they called it Project Morpheus. Morpheus would eventually, um well morph into PlayStation VR that became its official name as a as a product, the PlayStation camera would be part of this system, and it would help track the position of the VR headset, giving players more nuanced VR experience and more importantly, working with another

component in this system, the move controllers. Those would work with the camera and the camera would be able to pinpoint the relative position of the controller and provide more precise gameplay controls as a result. So in all, you would have the PlayStation camera, the move controller, and the

headset to work together to create PlayStation VR experience. And a lot of folks wondered if this might be the way to finally get virtual reality out of being kind of a curiosity or a niche market and into the mainstream. And you see one of the really big barriers for VR. Does that tend to be pretty expensive. Even if you can get the cost of a headset down to a couple of hundred dollars, which is still expensive, you typically need a pretty beefy computer system to run the software

for VR experiences. You want there to be no latency between the hardware and the game. Latency is that lag and in VR, latency leads to really bad motion sickness. You want graphics that are good and they hold up to scrutiny that they'll get from someone who is, you know, immerged in those graphics. And it's a tall order. And a PC based VR setup can cost thousands of dollars if you want one that runs really well. The PlayStation was a potential solution to this, right. PlayStation cost a

few hundred bucks itself, but people already had the game system. Right, Lots of people have already bought PS fours. We just before the break talked about how many many millions of units they sold in just two months. Fewer but still a lot had the PlayStation for plus a move controller in the PlayStation camera, so they would really only need to buy the headset. Other people would have to buy

the full system. The installed base for the PS four was going fairly strong, so there was this kind of optimism that perhaps this could be the equipment that made virtual reality a reality reality for more players. It would take about two years from the initial announcement of Project Morpheus to the launch of PlayStation VR and the headset hit shelves in the fall of two thousand and sixteen for like four bucks. The PlayStation VR system is is

pretty versatile. Developers can create games in which the person wearing the headset sees one set of images, and people watching the connected television to the console they could see something totally different. So in other cases, the games would just have the TV display mirror whatever the person wearing

the headset is seeing. But the fact that you could have two different displays meant that you could open out the possibility for cooperative or competitive gameplay, so that someone sitting on the couch watching the television can play in the same game that someone wearing the VR headset is playing, but they're playing, you know, two different modes of play or two different aspects of that game. So it opened up a lot of interesting possibilities from a developer standpoint,

and I think that's pretty darn cool. Now, did it bring VR into the main stream? I would argue it is not, but it has performed pretty well, and if we're to believe Sony, it actually has sold above expectations. At c e S twenty, that's the most recent as the recording of this episode, Sony announced that it had sold five million of the PlayStation VR systems, but that announcement also seemed to indicate that sales as a whole,

we're kind of slowing down. Because the previous announcement, the one they made before CSWY, had been ten months earlier, and at that point they had sold four point two million units, So if you were tracking trends, it looked like the trend had already hit a peak and now was starting to slope off. Now, they still sold eight hundred thousand more units between those two announcement that that's

that's significant, but it was still a slowdown. Going along with that was a perceived reduction in the number of titles being developed for the VR system. See at launch, game companies had released severn all high profile titles, some in beloved franchises for the PlayStation VR system, but that trend overall has slowed down. There have been fewer of

those titles released in the last year or two. And this is where we get into a sort of catch twenty two situation because gamers are reluctant to spend a lot of money, you know, like four hundred bucks for the PlayStation VR headset, and then several hundred more for a PS four especially they want to get a PS four pro more than that in a second, they're they're reluctant to do that if there isn't already a big

library of Dynamite games available for that system. Meanwhile, game developers are not really chomping at the bit to dedicate the assets that are required to build video games for a system that doesn't have a big audience, because it's harder to make your money back on that investment. If you say, well, we have two choices. We can make this one game that we can sell on all sorts of platforms and thus make a huge amount of money

after investing X million dollars in the development process. Or we can develop this VR game, but we already know the audience for that is a fraction of the size of the overall audience. That's you. That's a tough call. So you have not that many gamers pulling the trigger on buying the system and not many developers making games for it, and the hardware, even if it's really good, won't move like it won't sell very well, and that's a real issue. That being said, we could see an

enhanced PlayStation VR system offered for PlayStation five. More on that in a second, but let's finish up with PS four now. Backtracking just a little bit. In two thousand fourteen, so between when Sony announced Project Morpheus and when Sony VR actually launched, the company introduced a new service called PlayStation Now, which was also, you know, similar to PlayStation Network. This service allows subscribers to play a variety of PlayStation

titles through old streaming. So what does that mean. Well, in cloud streaming, the actual hardware running the game isn't your console or your phone or whatever. It's actually somewhere else, probably in a server farm that's potentially hundreds or maybe even thousands of miles away. The data from that machine gets streamed to some end device that you are accessing. So it could be a game console, it could be a computer, it could be a mobile device, it could

be a smart TV. And as you play the game, your choices so you know, for example, the buttons that you push on a controller zip back to the hardware that's actually running the game many miles away. For this to work well, particularly for very fast paced games like first person shooter type stuff, you want the distance between the server and the game system or the end device to be as short as possible, because otherwise you get

latency issues, and that's a big problem. It's really hard to make a precision run in a video game if there's a small delay between when you take an action using a controller and when you see play out on screen. Like let's say that you've got to make a jump and it's a really precise jump, but the game doesn't detect that you hit the jump button until after your character has apparently stepped off the edge of a cliff.

It's a very frustrating experience. With PlayStation now, gamers can access titles for the PS two, p S three, and PS four now not all titles, mind you, but a lot of them, like more than eight hundred titles, and they can play them on a PS four or on a PC, and a subscription is ten dollars a month. PS four owners can also download around three hundred titles

using this service as well. Now. In September, Sony announced the PS four Slim, which, as the name implies, is a slimmer version of the original PS four console, and they also announced the PS four Pro and that version of the PlayStation four can handle much higher resolution graphics. In fact, that's what supported four K graphics, so if you also had a four K television, you could get some seriously good looking games on your home set up. Now I've got, as I said, a p S four.

It's not a PS four Pro, and I really think it's a great system. There's some seriously unbelievably great games for that system. There are many exclusive or semi exclusive titles that are phenomenal, like the two thousand eighteen Spider Man game swings to mind. I love that game. It's a fantastic video game. Developers didn't have nearly the same amount of trouble programming for the PS four as they

did with the p S three. Even so, I think a lot of folks kind of view the PS four as a solid console, but more of a course correction as far as design elements go, than as something truly revolutionary. And that brings us to the PS five, which, again

as of this recording, has not been released. It's scheduled to launch later this year in Q four twenty, although with the COVID nineteen crisis, all of that is up in the air because manufacturing and shipping have been affected, not to mention customer behaviors are changing dramatically because we have to prioritize stuff, right, So all of this has been impacted in ways we don't even fully understand yet by this global emergency. However, we can talk a little

bit about what has been shared so far. On March eight. Mark Sarney a technical architect for the system. Some have referred to him as the Bob Ross of video game press events because he was very calming and very articulate, and people found it somewhat reassuring because this was in the early phases of people not knowing what to do

about COVID nineteen. Anyway, he talked a lot about the PS five specs in a very very technical way, which was super cool, but probably not the jazzy sort of thing that a lot of video gamers were hoping for. One big thing about the PS five is that it places a new emphasis on loading speed. So as games get more complicated, they require more computing assets. That's kind of a no brainer, and that often means that they

put a lot more stress on a console's memory. Game systems load information from hard drives or disks into RAM or random access memory. That's like the quick pick part of a computer systems memory. The system can consult that data rapidly as players work through a certain section of the game, and there's no delay because the information is right at hand. But unless the game is incredibly simple, there will come a point when the player maneuvers to a point that requires the system to pull new data

into memory. So it's got to get rid of the old stuff and pulling new stuff. Memory is a finite resource, right, so you can't just pull the whole game in there. You can pull the bits that are important at that moment, and the whole process of pulling new info and dumping old info takes a little time, and typically that manifests and game as a load screen. And Sony's details about the PS five seemed largely geared towards getting that downtime

minimized as much as possible. And this is going to be really important because we have to remember that as consoles get more complicated, game developers make more complicated games. So we're gonna see game developers really put these new consoles to the extreme. So one of the solutions Sony has is including a solid state drive or s s D into the PS five, and for a long time s s d s were super expensive. They have come

down in price over the years. This is typically the way we see technology move from expensive and hard to get to ever present and cheap. But solid state drives can load data into memory much quicker than older platter based hard drives. And if you wonder what those are, I've done episodes about it. But it's kind of similar to think of like a record player or a CD player. It's literally information stored on a platter and moving parts have to move to the rights spot on those platters

to pull data. Ssd s have no moving parts. They are lightning fast. The PS five will have a m D s Zen two microprocessor, and this is going to be one that has eight cores operating at a clock speed of three point five giga hurts. That's three point five billion cycles per second. It will also have a crazy powerful graphics processing unit or GPU that can operate at ten point twenty eight tara flops, which sounds like something that Doc Brown would say in Back to the Future.

A flop, just to remind you, is a floating point operation per second. You know, it's what flops stands for. Floating point opration per second. Flooding points are referred to decimals. It's when you boil it down. It's a really easy way for computers to handle calculations that could include very small and very large numbers. Uh. The this particular GPU can handle ten point twenty eight million million of those

operations in a second. Yes, million million, that's incredible. The PS five is also supporting three D audio capabilities, which will help developers make even more immersive gameplay experiences. I'm particularly excited by this because I think games that have really good sound design are incredibly impressive. I love games that that do that. The company is also working very closely with game developers in general, just to make sure that the system is going to be one that game

developers are going to want to develop for. It's another kind of nod to the troublesome past of the PS three, which again ultimately turned out well but initially was a bit of a problem. And reportedly it's going to be backwards compatible with PS four games, though they may not all be playable right at launch. That that, Sony has been very careful to say that that some titles will

be supported, with more titles supported down the line. The new dual Shock five controllers will likely be similar to Dual Shock four controllers, but reportedly will include a built in microphone, which suggests that the PS five will have a voice activated assistant akin to something like Alexa or Sirie. My apologies if I just activated those. And there's a

lot of speculation about the console design. It's rumored to have a sort of V shap shape motif to it, So if you've seen any of the mock ups or some of the photos that are purported to be of PS five developer kits, they have sort of this V design incorporated into the console itself. That kind of makes sense because V is the Roman numeral for five. Uh. There's an equal amount of speculation about the consoles sales price. Sony hasn't given one as of the recording of this episode.

Most guess is fall somewhere between four hundred and five hundred dollars in the US. And that's about all we know about the PS five as of the recording of this episode. There's a lot more speculation I could talk about, but I find that road not really worth traveling down. We can just wait to get more info later and If there's enough, then I can dedicate another episode just to the PlayStation five and talk about that. But for now, I think it's time to say goodbye to the PlayStation

and turn our eyes to some other tech topic. But I hope you guys enjoyed this exhaustive exploration of the history of the PlayStation consoles. Obviously there are other things I could have talked about, like the PSP. I didn't even touch on that, but honestly, I think of that as sort of a side the thing to the PlayStation consoles.

So I might do an episode in the future about different handheld systems, and that would obviously take a very important play in that particular discussion, as with the Nintendo Switch now that I think about it. So maybe in the future I'll cover that sort of thing, but for now we're gonna leave it, and we're probably gonna move away from video games for a little bit, just because you know, I don't want to turn into a video game podcast. There's plenty of those out there, and they

are all really good. I love you the besties. You guys are fantastic. That's not a plug. They don't know me. I just love that show. It's a lot of fun Um. They had a lease Willems from fun House on recently, and if you have not heard that episode of them talking about Doom, you should go check it out again. Free Plug. They have nothing to do with me, and

that wraps this up. You guys, reach out to me with any suggestions you have for future episodes, whether it's a company, a specific product, general trend and technology, anything like that. You can get in touch with me on Facebook or Twitter. The handle it both is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,