Sony PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan says virtual reality won't be a meaningful part of interactive entertainment in the near future. The Verge reports: Ryan indicated to The Washington Post that VR still has a long way to go, although he emphasized that Sony isn't giving up on the medium. The statement suggests that an update to Sony's PlayStation VR headset is years away.

"I think we're more than a few minutes from the future of VR," Ryan told the Post. "PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that." He notes that the upcoming PlayStation 5, which will be released November 12th, supports the old PlayStation VR headset with a special adapter.

Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X haven't hit stores yet, but the video game console showdown has already begun in the online black market. From a report: Demand for the PlayStation 5 on resale websites is outstripping that of the new Xbox, and shoppers are paying more to get their hands on the first run of products, market research shows. The vibrant market for scalpers offers a preview of next month's contest when the two rival game companies will release their new consoles to a global audience with a seemingly endless appetite for home entertainment. In the U.S., consumer spending on video game hardware, content and accessories is at record highs. The pandemic triggered a surge in players and engagement through the spring and summer months, at times depleting inventory of the current generation of consoles, according to research firm NPD Group. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X, the first major console releases from Sony and Microsoft in seven years, are among the most highly anticipated gadgets of the holiday season. Spending on games over the holidays is expected to jump 24% from last year. "Units will be tough to find," wrote Mat Piscatella, an analyst at NPD.

Poland's biggest computer game maker has delayed the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 for a third time, as it seeks to ensure the compatibility of its awaited product for current and next-generation consoles. From a report: CD Projekt SA has set a new release date on Dec. 10, and won't be able to keep its earlier scheduled premiere on Nov. 19, the studio said in regulatory filing on Tuesday. The management said it had "undercalculated" the time needed to complete the game since the title passed certification earlier this month. "First and foremost, please accept our humble apologies," Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Marcin Iwinski and CD Projekt RED studio's head Adam Badowski said on Twitter. "We feel we have an amazing game on our hands and we are willing to make every decision, ever the hardest ones, if it ultimately leads to you getting a video game you'll fall in love with." [...] The new date for launch of Cyberpunk, a role playing game set in dystopian urban environment, is scheduled weeks after planned launch of Microsoft Xbox Series X and Sony Playstation 5 consoles. It will also be behind many other gaming premieres planned in November as developers hope that gamers' propensity to spend will increase together with the first deliveries of new gaming equipment.

M.G. Siegler, former reporter at TechCrunch and now a VC at Google Ventures, writes: [...] It seems inevitable at this point that there's going to need to be a new path forward. And that path may very well be one that looks similar to a path forged at the beginning of the business. That is, studios owning theaters. People will remember that this type of vertical integration is what led to the Paramount Decree in the 1940s. The studios used to control not only the production of movies, but the exhibition of them and were forced to divest from the latter in the name of competition. As the above 400ish words should make clear: the world is very different now. And as a good bit of timing luck would have it, the consent decrees are being unwound. This doesn't mean studios will be able to partake in any kind of anti-competitive behavior, but it should mean they can own theaters again. Because, again, the world is a very different place than it was in the 1940s.

One could imagine Disney or the like stepping in to save AMC. Perhaps with the notion that they would still agree to show other studios' films as well. But perhaps they would go above and beyond to showcase their own. Or maybe Disney+ subscribers would get a deal. Etc. And then maybe ViacomCBS (Paramount) buys Regal. Comcast (Universal) buys Cinemark. Sony buys Cineplex. Etc. Or maybe Amazon buys one of them. Netflix has already bought/saved a couple of theaters, perhaps that continues. Again, in that case, it's less about the theatrical business model and more about marketing. And you know who loves marketing just as much as anyone else? Apple. A decade ago, it would have seemed comical to have Apple potentially owning movie theaters. Now with all the money they're pouring into Apple TV+ and wooing the best Hollywood talent, it may seem downright logical. Imagine a movie theater that isn't a public restroom, but instead is a cinematic palace. You know, like they were in the old days. Certainly, those still exist in places. But the AMCs of the world spent the last 20 years wiping them out and screening films in their hollowed out carcasses. It sounds crazy to hope for a world where some of the biggest companies on the planet -- the Amazons, the Apples, the Disneys -- step in to save movie theaters, but such is the state of the world.

Apple, Netflix and other streaming services explored the possibility of acquiring "No Time to Die," the upcoming James Bond movie that was originally slated to debut last April. From a report: The film's release has been postponed multiple times, with the Daniel Craig vehicle moving back to November before being pushed into 2021 as the number of coronavirus cases kept growing. MGM, the studio behind the film, reportedly lost between $30 million to $50 million due to the delays, insiders said. Bloomberg first reported the discussions, which have been the topic du jour in Hollywood this week. Other studios, such as Paramount and Sony, have raked in tens of millions by selling movies like "Greyhound," "Coming 2 America" and "Without Remorse" to streaming services while the exhibition sector continues to struggle during the pandemic.

However, multiple insiders at rival studios and companies said that a possible Bond sale was explored overtly, and believe that MGM was at least open to the possibility of unloading their crown jewel for a princely sum. The studio was said to be looking for a deal of roughly $600 million -- a price tag that was deemed too rich for two of the free-spending streaming services. A sale of this magnitude would be led exclusively by Kevin Ulrich, the chairman and CEO of MGM's majority owner Anchorage Capital Group, insiders said.

Microsoft has teased a Chromecast-style dongle for xCloud, a video game streaming service that currently comes bundled with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. From a report: In an interview with Stratechery, Xbox chief Phil Spencer said: "I think you're going to see lower-priced hardware as part of our ecosystem when you think about streaming sticks and other things that somebody might want to just go plug into their TV and go play via xCloud." A few moments later, he added: "You could imagine us even having something that we just included in the Game Pass subscription that gave you an ability to stream xCloud games to your TV and buying the controller." These remarks were part of a conversation around Xbox All Access. Unlike Sony, Microsoft is offering a 24-month payment plan for its next-generation consoles, the Xbox Series S and X. As part of the deal, customers gain access to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which includes a library of downloadable games on PC and Xbox hardware, as well as streamable titles via xCloud. Spencer revealed that the Xbox team has debated internally whether All Access should be pitched as 'Xbox Game Pass Platinum' instead. He then talked about a plan that gives you "some kind of hardware guarantee" when new consoles are launched. "We did that a little bit with Xbox One last year," he explained. "Where if you got into All Access, you were guaranteed to get front in line when the Series X came out. People didn't know the name [of the new console] at the time, but yeah."

New details have emerged about a partnership between Microsoft and GameStop that will see the retailer receive a share of all digital revenues generated by a console sold in their stores. GamesIndustry.biz reports: The agreement has been rumored, but investment advisor DOMO Capital Management claimed via Twitter that it had received confirmation from GameStop: the chain will get a share of all downstream revenue for customers it brings into the Xbox ecosystem this generation. Essentially, if a customer has purchased their Xbox Series X or S from any GameStop branch, the retailer will get a share of each digital purchase the user makes, whether its full-game downloads or downloadable content.

DOMO even claims this applies when the DLC is being purchased for a physical base game that was bought at another retailer, providing the DLC is being bought from the Xbox store. This also extends to pre-owned Xbox Series X and S consoles, with GameStop reporting to Microsoft every unit that it sells. It's unclear whether a similar arrangement exists with Sony.

GameStop jumped as much as 27% after a strategic partnership with Microsoft gave investors fresh optimism that the video-game retailer can turn around its business. From a report: Under a multiyear agreement, GameStop will use Microsoft's cloud services to handle business operations, including finance, inventory and e-commerce, according to a statement Thursday. In-store workers also will use Microsoft Surface devices while they're helping customers. And GameStop will offer Xbox All Access, a monthly service for the Xbox gaming console. GameStop is expected to get a surge in sales when new video-game consoles arrive in coming weeks, and the Microsoft partnership could help them extend the momentum. A new Xbox and Sony PlayStation are debuting next month, which should drive traffic to GameStop's stores and e-commerce site.

Sony's recently-released PS5 teardown video gives us a closer look at the PS5, and confirms that the speed of the console's Wi-Fi antenna and USB ports are faster than those available in the Xbox Series X. GamesRadar+ reports: As spotted by VG247, the teardown confirms a few new hardware details about PS5. For starters, we know the console's Wi-Fi antenna supports the new Wi-Fi 6 standard, which allows for a new maximum speed of 9.6 Gbps -- more than twice the 3.5 Gbps ceiling for Wi-Fi 5. This doesn't mean your PS5 will be able to use all of that to send your download speeds through the roof. The practical benefit is that Wi-Fi 6 routers can better distribute all that speed to a bunch of devices at once, and to maintain their performance over time. So if you have a Wi-Fi 6 router and a home full of connected devices, there's a good chance you will notice the improvement. For reference, the Xbox Series X Wi-Fi antenna supports Wi-Fi 5.

As for the USB ports, we already knew that PS5 has a USB-C port and a USB-A port on the front. The teardown video confirms the type-C port will support 10Gbps transfer speeds, and it confirms that the two USB-A ports on the back will as well. The type-A port on the front isn't as quick, so if you plan to plug in an external PS5 SSD make sure you use one of the ports on the back. Xbox Series X doesn't include any type-C ports, and all of its type-A ports run at the standard 5gbps speed. If you know that fast connection speeds will make a big difference to your play experience, you may want to lean toward PS5 -- but as always, the biggest deciding factor should be what games you want to play and how well each console plays them. The Verge also notes the PS5 includes removable sides, dust catchers, and storage expansion.

On Friday America's Department of Justice announced: Two leaders of one of the world's most notorious videogame piracy groups, Team Xecuter, have been arrested and are in custody facing charges filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle... The indictment alleges the defendants were leaders of a criminal enterprise that developed and sold illegal devices that hacked popular videogame consoles so they could be used to play unauthorized, or pirated, copies of videogames. The enterprise targeted popular consoles such as the Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition, the Sony PlayStation Classic, and the Microsoft Xbox.

"These defendants were allegedly leaders of a notorious international criminal group that reaped illegal profits for years by pirating video game technology of U.S. companies," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. "These arrests show that the department will hold accountable hackers who seek to commandeer and exploit the intellectual property of American companies for financial gain, no matter where they may be located."

"These defendants lined their pockets by stealing and selling the work of other video-game developers — even going so far as to make customers pay a licensing fee to play stolen games," said U.S. Attorney Brian Moran for the Western District of Washington. "This conduct doesn't just harm billion dollar companies, it hijacks the hard work of individuals working to advance in the video-game industry."

"Theft of intellectual property hurts U.S. industry, game developers and exploits legitimate gaming customers, all of which threaten the legitimacy of the commercial video game industry," said Acting Special Agent in Charge Eben Roberts of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations, Seattle. "We are committed to working with our international partners to find criminals like these who steal copyrighted material and bring cyber criminals to justice...."

According to the indictment, Team Xecuter at times cloaked its illegal activity with a purported desire to support gaming enthusiasts who wanted to design their own videogames for noncommercial use. However, the overwhelming demand and use for the enterprise's devices was to play pirated videogames.

Nintendo is about to release its biggest product for the holiday season, where it will be up against new-generation consoles from rivals Microsoft and Sony. An early look at the new Mario Kart game for the Switch, featuring augmented reality and your living room as the race track, indicates that Nintendo will be just as competitive. From a report: In Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, which becomes available from the Japanese gaming giant on Oct. 16, players use their Switch consoles to race and around their home. The action places animated objects in real-world surroundings, along the lines of Pokemon Go. Here's how it works: You, holding your Switch, play through what would look like a regular game of Mario Kart if not for your couch and dinner table in the background. You'll steer around a real toy kart on a track you've plotted out in your house. A camera attached to the kart feeds footage to your Switch screen, allowing you to take control of Mario or Luigi as they collect mushrooms and drive laps.

The game, previewed over a Zoom call with a Nintendo representative, looks fun and challenging, with a robust selection of options such as custom races and environments. Everything one might expect from a Mario Kart game is here, from the sound effects to the prominent presence of Lakitu, a friendly monster who sits on a cloud and referees the race, occasionally using a fishing rod to rescue you from danger. You can build elaborate racing tracks out of furniture and cardboard, limited only by the size of your room, which may be a drag for those in New York apartments.

Microsoft is about to release a big Xbox app update for iOS that includes the ability to stream Xbox One games to an iPhone. The Verge reports: A new Xbox app will arrive in the App Store soon that includes a remote play feature, which lets Xbox One console owners stream their games to an iPhone. Remote play is different to Microsoft's xCloud service, which streams games directly from servers instead of your own Xbox One console. This Xbox remote play feature will only connect to your own Xbox console, not to xCloud. It's similar to Sony's own PS4 Remote Play feature that's also available on Android and iOS.

You will be able to access an Xbox console over Wi-Fi, or even an LTE or 5G connection, too. As this app takes control of your home Xbox, you can remotely start your console outside of your home. The Xbox will start up without a sound or the Xbox light at the front, and when you disconnect, it goes back into standby after a brief period of inactivity. A new Xbox app arrived on Android recently, and this updated iPhone version includes the same new design and new features.

Samsung has unveiled its next high-performance NVMe 2280-sized M.2 drive, the 980 Pro. So far, it comes in three capacities shipping this month: 250GB for $89.99, 500GB for $149.99, and 1TB for $229.99. A 2TB model will arrive later this year, but Samsung didn't share a price. From a report: The standout feature of this drive is its compatibility with M.2 slots over the PCIe 4.0 interface. If you have a compatible motherboard, Samsung says the 980 Pro can go on a tear with sequential read / write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s, respectively. It claims that this is two times faster performance than PCIe 3.0 SSDs and nearly 13 times faster than the more affordable but slower SATA SSDs. Of course, to get the best speeds out of this Samsung M.2 drive, you'll need a compatible motherboard with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot. Adoption of the tech is starting to ramp up, including mainstream computing products like AMD's third-generation Ryzen CPUs, its Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT GPUs, and more recently, Nvidia's RTX 3080 graphics card. Sony and Microsoft are also using the technology for their custom SSD technologies in the PS5 and Xbox Series S / X consoles.

"Steve Jobs is now known for revolutionizing just about every part of the tech world, but back in 1988, he was perhaps best known for getting fired," remembers SFGate: In his first product reveal since his dismissal from Apple in 1985, Jobs unveiled a new project called NeXT at a meeting of the Boston Computer Society. An audio recording of the event was unearthed and released as part of a trove of early tech recordings released by Charles Mann, as reported in an extensive feature by Fast Company...

Computing advances included a UNIX operating system that allows multi-tasking, a one million pixel display, CD quality sound and a then unprecedented 256 MB of storage. The computer would be completely built by robots rather than a human assembly line, which he said resulted in a defect rate 10 times lower than its competitors. The partnership with academia makes even more sense once you consider the price-tag of $6,500.
Fast Company's tech editor Harry McCracken was at the 1988 event, and quotes Jobs as saying "The Macintosh architecture is going to peak next year sometime. And that means that there's enough cracks in the wall already, and enough limitations to the architecture, that the Mac's pretty much going to be everything it's ever going to be sometime next year."

Some clips are available on Soundcloud, but the full trove of tech recordings includes 200 full hours of audio and 16 more of video (available on a USB drive for $59.95) showing luminaries from the early days of personal technology. "In 1985, for instance, a month after Commodore announced its groundbreaking Amiga computer in New York City, president Tom Rattigan came to Boston to show it to BCS members and argue that it left the Mac in the dust." Other recordings include Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, Osborne computer designer Adam Osborne, and investor Esther Dyson, McCracken writes:

Jobs is on three recordings — one from his first Apple tenure, and two from NeXT. Bill Gates is on five. There are folks who were already legends (mobile-computing visionary Alan Kay, marketer extraordinaire Regis McKenna) and up-and-comers (budding PC tycoon Michael Dell, age 23). Everyone from Sony cofounder Akio Morita to psychedelics advocate and part-time technologist Timothy Leary is represented; just the Apple-related material, including CEO John Sculley talking about the company in the 21st century and Hypercard creator Bill Atkinson demoing his brainchild, is a feast...

The audio of Jobs's NeXT demo at the BCS — and dozens of other recordings — exist solely because Mann realized more than 35 years ago that the talks going on at computer user-group meetings and conferences were history in the making... In May 1982, the BCS hosted Applefest, an Apple II-centric fair that featured already-iconic Apple cofounders Jobs and Wozniak as keynote speakers. In this excerpt, fielding a question from the audience, they talk about software copy protection. Woz does so from a technical bent; Jobs, who speaks of a future involving low prices and convenient electronic distribution, sounds like he was thinking about the App Store decades before it appeared. This is rare, rare stuff; if you know of even one other example of surviving audio or video of Jobs and Wozniak talking about Apple together, I'd love to hear about it.

In a Wednesday interview, Sony Interactive Entertainment chief Jim Ryan confirmed that the upcoming PlayStation 5 console won't natively support PS1, PS2, or PS3 games. Ars Technica reports: Ryan explained that "PS5-specific engineering" meant the design team was mostly focused on "the simultaneous use of high-speed SSDs and the new DualSense controller." This prevented Sony from delivering compatibility with older consoles, Ryan told Famitsu, even though he made clear that Sony wanted to support PlayStation 4's "100 million players" by developing compatibility with "99%" of PS4 games, since "we thought that they would like to play PS4 titles on the PS5, as well."

This announcement doesn't clarify whether PS1 games purchased for use on PS4 will transfer to PS5. It also doesn't mention the existing ability for players to stream older-generation games to PS4 from the PlayStation Now cloud-subscription service or whether we should expect that functionality to seamlessly transfer to PS5 in November. [...] Wednesday's dump of PlayStation 5 news did not go into further detail about additional boosts to PS4 games as played on the upcoming console. Instead, we learned that some major PlayStation 5 games, particularly Horizon: Forbidden West and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, will launch simultaneously on PS5 and PS4. This appears to run somewhat counter to Sony's recent comments about maintaining "generations" instead of supporting an Xbox-style "forward-compatible" plan for its biggest games.

The PlayStation 5 will cost $499 for the standard version of Sony's next-gen console and $399 for the PS5 Digital Edition -- the system without an optical disc drive -- when it launches Nov. 12, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced Wednesday during its PlayStation 5 Showcase livestream. From a report: The Nov. 12 release date is for the consoles' launches in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. They'll become available on Nov. 19 for the rest of the world, Sony said. Sony's PS5 price announcement follows similar news from Microsoft, which announced the release date of its $499 Xbox Series X and $299 Xbox Series S earlier in September.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The latest quarterly earnings report from GameStop doesn't show much sign of a turnaround for the long-troubled game retailer. Sales were down 26.7 percent year over year for the April through June quarter. Even accounting for permanent store closures and COVID-related reduced operating hours, so-called comparable "same-store" sales were still down 12.7 percent year over year. GameStop's already depressed stock is down nearly 8 percent on the news, as of this writing. GameStop still publicly sees an "opportunity to capitalize" on the upcoming release of new Sony and Microsoft consoles, which could help turn its business around in the short term. But there's some reason to believe the coming generation of consoles could actually make GameStop's long-term prospects worse, thanks to console options that get rid of disc drives entirely.

In an earnings call, GameStop CEO George Sherman acknowledged that "there has been growth in digitally downloaded games" and said GameStop is "not debating the growth of digital gaming." But he also tried to put a positive spin on the fate of GameStop's physical game sales going into the next generation of consoles. "First, new consoles have a disc drive," Sherman said. "So for the next seven years, the consoles will play both the physical and digital software that we sell." That's only partially true, though. Both the Xbox Series S and the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition actually won't have a disc drive. And while GameStop does sell some digital software, the bulk of its business comes from the sale of new physical games and high-margin pre-owned games. We don't know what percentage of consumers will opt for these disc-free consoles, of course. Still, lower hardware costs could definitely make discless consoles an attractive option to many potential customers this generation. The Xbox Series S is $200 cheaper than the more-powerful, disc-drive-equipped Series X, a sum that could go toward a lot of digital game purchases...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Horizon: Zero Dawn probably won't be the last former PlayStation exclusive to make the jump to PC. In its 2020 corporate report published late last week, Sony says that it "will explore expanding our 1st party titles to the PC platform, in order to promote further growth in our profitability." The "explore" wording there is a little bit couched, suggesting that Sony still hasn't completely made up its mind on the specifics of further PC game publishing. And the report doesn't go into detail on which games, if any, Sony considers ripe for porting. And even if Sony does continue publishing on PC, we shouldn't necessarily expect major PlayStation titles to hit Steam on the same day as the coming PS5. In Horizon's case, Sony waited a full 1,256 days between the game's February, 2017 launch on PS4 and its PC launch earlier this month.

All that said, explicitly mentioning the potential for PC ports in its annual report is the latest sign that Sony continues to slowly loosen its tight, walled-garden approach to game hardware and software. [...] It all speaks to a company that's more aware that "competition from online PC games and players from other industries is expected to continue to intensify," as it says in its annual report. Even as Sony pushes hard for the exclusive "speed, haptics, and sound" improvements of the upcoming PlayStation 5 this year, it is hedging its bets somewhat with support for non-Sony hardware as well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ever since the hype campaigns began for the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, we've gotten apparent teases of real-time next-gen gameplay, enough to convince us that these systems are adequately powerful. But the full-blown execution of what "only on PlayStation 5" can look like finally crystallized for the first time on Thursday. It came in the form of six uninterrupted minutes of live gameplay from Insomniac Games' Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, which will debut on the PS5 during the console's "launch window," we learned today. Sony couldn't have rolled out a better, more convincing sense of what top-to-bottom next-gen gaming architecture can deliver than this shiny, explosive, SSD-powered sequence -- and so far, it's more stunning than anything we've seen from Xbox Series X-exclusive fare.

Nintendo plans to debut an upgraded model of its Switch console next year along with a lineup of new games, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter said, ceding 2020's holiday spotlight to rival devices from Sony and Microsoft. From the report: The specifications of the new machine have yet to be finalized, though the Kyoto-based company has looked into including more computing power and 4K high-definition graphics, people briefed on the strategy told Bloomberg News, asking not to be identified because it's private. Nintendo faces stiff competition for gamers' attention this fall as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are set to arrive in time for the shopping season. The release of the upgraded Switch would be coupled with, or followed by, a slew of games from Nintendo itself and related outside studios, the people said. Those games would address a wide range of players, from casual gamers seeking small doses of escapism to more devoted fans putting in marathon gaming sessions. The focus on next year's pipeline explains Nintendo's relatively quiet software release schedule so far this year, the people said.