Ahead of the PlayStation 5 launch, Sony is rebranding its first-party developers and uniting its exclusives under the PlayStation Studios banner.
PlayStation Studios will replace the previously used name of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios. To commemorate the new branding, Sony released a 17-second opening animation that will appear after booting up its internally developed titles. Several critically acclaimed Sony franchises pop up during the opening including God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, LittleBigPlanet, Ratchet and Clank, The Last of Us, and Uncharted.
The new branding won’t just be on games by Sony’s internal developers, such as Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and Guerrilla Games. It will also include titles by third-party developers that Sony produces and publishes.
Beyond the opening animation, players can see the PlayStation Studios branding on game discs and boxes. Trailers and other advertisements will have shorter versions of the opening. Sony wants the logo to be synonymous with its first-party quality as it has released some of the most critically and commercially successful games over the past decade.
The PlayStation Studios branding will be ready for the launch of the PS5 later this year, though some high-profile summer releases, The Last of Us: Part II, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Horizon Zero Dawn on PC, will still carry the older Sony Interactive Entertainment opening. Still, it’s not a PS5-exclusive change, as future PlayStation 4 titles will reflect the rebranding along with any of Sony’s PC releases.
“The strength of the titles coming out from our studios has been stronger than ever,” Sony head of global marketing Eric Lempel told GameIndustry.biz. “We have been thinking about how we unite all of these great games under one brand, and really the purpose of that is to make the consumer understand that, when they see this brand, they’re getting ready for a robust, innovative, deep experience that they’ve come to expect from games coming from PlayStation. So we came up with PlayStation Studios.”
Lempel is excited about introducing variants of the opening animation in the future to reflect new franchises and to create specific ones that celebrate long-running series. He believes that consumers were previously confused as to what games actually came from Worldwide Studios, and this rebranding will help players find Sony’s exclusive offerings on PS5 and beyond.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.