It’s hard to imagine a company with a greater influence on consumer electronics than Sony. You can trace a direct line from the Walkman -- the first portable media player -- to the smartphone. Today Sony is a massive force in gaming, making the PlayStation and publishing games for it and other platforms. Sony image sensors are in iPhones as well as its own mirrorless cameras. Not to mention the OLED TVs; smartphones; noise-canceling headphones; music, tv, and film publishing; and, yes, robot dogs.
If you missed it last night, here’s the moment we found out the pricing for both trim levels of Sony / Honda’s Afeela 1 EV: $89,900 for the Afeela 1 Origin and $102,900 for the Afeela 1 Signature.
Preorders are open now, unless you prefer a PS5 Pro and Gran Turismo 7 as a cheaper option.
On deck: updates about how to pre-order Afeela, the electric vehicle Sony is making with Honda.
This year paved the way for a future where earbuds are much more than audio accessories.
Shank Mods’ winding tale about rescuing the behemoth Sony PVM-4300 from a recently closed restaurant on the other side of the globe is a delight from start to finish. (And getting the TV is only part of the story.)
All I will think about for the rest of the day is playing 4-player Mario Kart: Double Dash!! on this beauty.
Sony has made bad Spider-Man spinoff movies before, but Kraven the Hunter is another level of terrible.
Chris Barrett has filed a suit against his former employers alleging they, “deliberately destroyed his reputation” with claims that he was found to have engaged in sexual misconduct. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Barrett had been fired in March after an internal investigation. In a post on social media, Barrett denied any wrongdoing. He is seeking $200 million in damages.
[Twitter]
Though none of Sony’s ads for Kraven the Hunter have done a great job making clear what the film’s appeal is meant to be, this lengthy new clip suggests that Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s smolder might be the whole point.
Bilibil-kun, the Dealabs leaker who correctly revealed the design of the PlayStation 5 Pro, now says the currently white PS Portal will soon be available in black for the same $200 price.
While the PS Portal can only stream games, it recently got updated to stream some of them from the cloud. Meanwhile, Sony’s also reportedly working on a true Nintendo Switch / Steam Deck rival.
[Dealabs Magazine]
The former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios and current head of indie initiatives has been a part of PlayStation since it started in 1993, but now he’s leaving in January.
Shuhei Yoshida (aka @yosp) explains on the official podcast and in another in-depth interview that he felt it was time and that PlayStation is in good hands.
A deal with Kadokawa, the media conglomerate that also owns Octopath Traveler developer Acquire and Danganronpa developer Spike Chunsoft, could be signed in the coming weeks, according to Reuters. Sony already owns 14 percent of FromSoftware.
Kadokawa notably has a 70 percent stake in the developer behind Elden Ring, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls.
We’ve got portable CD players on the brain this week, but did you know Sony once made a wearable DVD player that let you watch movies while out for a stroll? YouTube’s Techmoan recently tested Sony’s D-VM1 from 2001 which looked like a chonky CD player, but had an inline remote with a lightweight 3.5-inch screen for watching DVDs away from home.
Firewalk Studios’ Concord may no longer be with us, but the game is still going to have another (short) moment in the sun when Amazon’s Secret Level anthology series premieres on December 10th.
I’ve got a whole series of these hands-on gadget videos — find more on my Threads — but with the PS5 Pro, it’s only now I’ve been able to make one! At Sony’s preview event, journalists couldn’t touch the final hardware so I focused on what it’s like to play; at review time, my video tried to show off the graphics.
Speaking of...
Need I say more? If you’re determined to hear every little morsel about Sony’s upgraded console and a thorough breakdown of which games benefit most from the added GPU horsepower and PSSR upscaling, here you go. No one does it quite like the folks at Digital Foundry.
PlayStation has revealed the trailer for Death Note Killer Within... and it’s basically an Among Us-style social deduction game. Instead of hunting for the “imposter,” L’s team must try to find Kira.
Sony’s third Venom feature feels like another throwback to when comic book movies kept things short and silly.
After Amazon and Sony parted ways with the original creative team working on the live-action adaptation, Deadline reports that Moore has joined the production as writer, executive producer, and showrunner.
Moore is best known for producing Battlestar Galactica and for his work on Star Trek spinoffs Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation.
Showrunner Rafe Judkins and executive producers Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus were well into their preproduction process for Amazon’s live-action God of War series. But Deadline reports that, even though Amazon and Sony were into the creative team’s scripts, the studios have decided “move in a different creative direction” with the help of an entirely new writers room.
Though Supermassive’s Until Dawn was already plenty cinematic as a video game, Deadline reports that Screen Gems plans for its big screen adaptation of the horror classic to hit theaters on April 25, 2025.
The feature comes from director David F. Sandberg and writer Gary Dauberman. Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Odessa A’zion, Maia Mitchell and Peter Stormare are set to star.
The Go! Explore PSP GPS accessory for directions still works today, and even looks surprisingly modern, as Jon Cartwright shows in this Good Vibes Gaming video. He says it worked well.
But also, I never knew that Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops had a GPS feature! I miss that era of Sony.
As Reddit, Push Square, and others are pointing out, the very good 2022 game is suddenly sporting a “PS5 Pro Enhanced” badge. Sony hasn’t yet confirmed a patch, nor do we have details on how the game might get enhanced.
