Sony has reported run into supply chain troubles with the upcoming PlayStation 5, according to Bloomberg, something Sony denies. The PlayStation maker is said to have ramped down its production estimates by 4 million due to manufacturing issues with its upcoming gaming console’s custom-designed system-on-chip, but the company denies this is true.
“While we do not release details related to manufacturing, the information provided by Bloomberg is false,” a Sony spokesperson told Digital Trends. “We have not changed the production number for PlayStation 5 since the start of mass production.”
Sony was reportedly expected to produce about 15 million units of the PlayStation 5 for this fiscal year, but that figure has now been brought down to 11 million. People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that production yields, a metric that manufacturers use to determine how many of the produced units are ready to ship against the number of defective ones, for the PS5’s revamped processor are as low as 50%, a relatively under average result. While this figure is reportedly improving, it has yet to reach a stable level.
Incidentally, Sony had boosted PS5 production by about 50% earlier this year in anticipation of the holiday season demand and the rise in gaming as more people, while sheltering at home, look for new avenues of entertainment.
Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad said, in a tweet, that even though production issues such as this are fairly normal, especially at the beginning of a console launch, it does “seem more severe than expected.”
It’s also worth noting that this supposed supply chain snag likely won’t affect PS5’s sales in the initial months. Its effects would be more prominent later in 2021, depending on the demand and whether Sony manages to up its production yields in time.
In an earlier rumor, Ahmad claimed Sony will ship PS5 stock to the U.S. by air instead of sea, a more expensive decision to speed up shipments and meet retail demand.
Sony is hosting a virtual event on Wednesday, September 16, where it’s expected to announce PlayStation 5’s price and release date. The company began accepting pre-orders for the new gaming console late last month.
The Sony PlayStation 5 offers 8K gaming and 4K gaming at 120Hz thanks to a new eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU, a custom AMD RDNA 2-based GPU, and 825GB of SSD storage — that together can produce 10.28 teraflops of power, nearly double that of its predecessor, the PS4 Pro’s 4.2 teraflops.
Updated on September 15, 2020: This story was changed to reflect Sony’s rebuttal of lowered production reports.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.