February 22 marked three years since the Vita first entered our lives (in EU/US at least). The PlayStation Vita has come under a lot of attack during its short life, and unfortunately Sony doesn’t seem to support it as much as the fans would like. One big complaint that a lot of people make about the Vita is the lack of games. This just isn’t true! It’s a sad fact that, in the UK at least, not many places stock Vita games, and when they do, there’s a very limited selection on a very small section of a shelf.
But just log on to the PlayStation store, and you’ll see literally hundreds of games available to download: from big-name titles like Uncharted and Final Fantasy to obscure Japanese titles that you wouldn’t be able to play anywhere else.
Not only that, but there’s a whole category of free Vita games and applications available to download straight away. Not demos, not trials, but completely free. So dust off your Vita, log onto the store, and show it some love… free of charge!
PlayStation Plus is getting a price rise in Australia and other global regions, with subscribers set to pay a few dollars more on each tier.
Sadly the price increases are expanding to Australia and likely other regions beyond.
Seems like it's best to stack now if you're in the position to do so
I try to stack every time they offer a psn sale that discounts the deluxe tier by 30 percent I find that's the best way to get past the multi year increases but yeah it's sucked feel like everything has increased so much lately across all subs I've cancelled gamepass and a few other streaming services going back to just psn, NSO and Netflix
Same here. I let my subscription lapse since it ran out last summer. If we do the math, is a console really cheaper than a PC? It sucks that I can no longer play Helldivers 2, but it is not worth spending so much on the subscription fee for a function that should be free.
PS plus essential is $80
PS5 is $500
The generation is expected to last 7-8 years, which means you would have spent at least $1060 just to access basic features along with the initial purchase. Not to mention some games being more expensive. There are also the additional controllers you may need to buy once your original ones start to drift. I have 3 DualSense controllers, and all of them drifted. I was able to fix 2 of the 3 by modding them with Hall effect sticks.
I love my Playstation, and I do not regret buying it at launch since I got to enjoy some great games like Ratchet and Clank, Horizon Forbidden West, Spiderman 2, Demon Souls, Astro Bot, and God of War Ragnarok.
The issue I have is that the Playstation that we know today is different from the Playstation we had in the PS4 era. Things are also getting progressively more expensive as time goes on.
Once the PC hardware situation improves, I will be looking to build my own one part at a time instead of getting a Pro console.
@ Divine
The PC situation won't get better. If you want to game, you will need to choose who you want to get screwed by.
Terrible idea to Stack now in my opinion. The raise is not that much for 12 months, so you might as well wait for the 30% sales at the end of year, because you will be saving more money. That's when I'm going to stack like a mofo. I'll buy like 5 years then
You gotta love the attitude people had before: "Price hike! NO, THIS IS TERRIBLE, I HATE—wait ... South America? lol ok."
It starts hitting closer to home and now we're worried. It was always a concern and people should have always treated it that way.
Funny enough, Sony is likely losing subscribers with every price hike, and all they're doing is offering the beefed up service to fewer people. Doubtful this offsets the lost subs.
Haven't had Plus in years, and I don't miss it. And frankly, with the way things are going, I just don't see myself getting into the next generation either. Increased reliance on AI, stagnant gaming experiences despite better tech, untenable budgets, increased cost to consumers, tendency to push GaaS, very long development cycles, weak/non-existent digital rights protections, poor global economy, tariff madness.
It's probably a better use of my time to double down on my other hobbies. Can't speak for others, but it wouldn't be surprising if the market crashes because enough people come to the same conclusion.
Sony has been quietly working on a PS5 Pro PSSR update that addresses visual issues experienced in some previously released games.
Fast forwarding it's going to be interesting to see how PSSR will have evolved since 2024 once the PS6 is one month or so away from release.
Personally though, I gotta admit I am still not that keen towards upscalers.
Since I've got that feeling that they've been somewhat invented to just reduce costs and therefore sacrifice quality.
But, yeah, dunno, maybe it's just me.
I love them. Anything that can deliver a similar image with vastly less power used can only be good for gamers. No evidence in games yet to say they're releasing at less quality because of them
I think they serve a purpose, but overall the power they use I think is better spent just giving us a smaller boost to res instead of a larger upscale. Artifacts are worse that state stepping and pixelation.
Its the difference between working smarter instead of harder. And espcially in a world where more the most performant gaming GPUs are out of the price range of most consumers.... even then the highest of high end rigs will struggle with state of the art visuals at native 4K at a decent framerate.
100% upscalers are both cost reduction and efficient improvements. That isn't a bad thing at all.
Imagine hardware costs and power consumption to handle everything natively
I don't think it has much to do with financial savings personally, I think the introduction of AI upscalers is more about leveraging technology to get the most possible performance out of a GPU.
Personally, I am a big fan, I am currently playing AC Shadows on my PS5Pro and it is jaw dropping to look at!
Speaking of AC Shadows, I read somewhere that Ubi still haven't released a proper update for the Pro so once they release that, it should look even better.
You are not keen on getting more out of the power that you have? I don’t understand the argument.
You are in a console-focused space, where people's understanding of technology is barely akin to that of a child. Basically, if it looks shiny, it's good. So, I don't think your point will be popular.
But yes, ML-based upscalers were created primarily to make development easier and cheaper. They function by allowing developers to skip certain details, which are later added by the model, and by enabling the adoption of cost-saving and time-saving technologies like ray tracing.
It is quite literally the opposite of "free power" or "extracting more power" from the hardware. That would happen without these models, where rasterization techniques would need to be used, tailor-made for each game and hardware, thereby extracting every ounce of power available.
The genius of it is not the tech itself, it is the marketing. Manufacturers presented two equally bad options for users and developers: spatial algorithm upscalers and ML-based upscalers. So, these groups chose the least bad of the two, without realizing that the third, much better option, no upscalers at all, was deliberately hidden. So they are here to stay.
Thank you very much for the explaination. That's exactly how I feel about these upscalers.
And this feeling originated from, as one example watching DF tech videos.
And from them coming to the conclusion that there's a sacrifice being made by developers using upscaling.
(And that DF for that matter, although they actually have the knowledge about what's going on beneath, probably rather committing to their business model to produce videos accompanying upscale technology. But not investigating it, not going beneath it. Which is fine, because they had to make a choice business wise. I can understand Richard, who still criticizes when he seees fit.)
So thanks again!
And of course:
I knew this would blow up the downvotes.
Despite having actually phrased excitment about where PSSR will stand in a few years, right at the beginning of my comment.
But "Oh, 3 downvotes already!" often times lead to just more downvotes.
And I am totally fine with people not agreeing with a comment I've made in the Internet.
I don't get why people against AI upscaler, eventually we won't be able to tell the differences, and we save money on keep chasing GPU with raw power for 4k, 120fps, ray tracing... which even top of the line card that costs thousands of dollars cannot do.
More like youll pay a premium for AI upscale rather then receive actual performance upgrade for the price.
You don’t like upscalers? So you don’t like getting more out of your hardware? Niiiiice
I just can't believe how much more emersive of a game GOW:Rangerok is on the pro. I'm going for the platinum 🏆. Stunning!
I can't see any difference at all on any PSSR title. In fact, In GT7, it makes the image worse, with a weird shimmering texture on car interiors.
I feel cheated after having bought the Pro. The only really good thing about it is 60FPS in many more games. But graphically, I can't see *any* improvement, regardless of game, PSSR on or off.
What have you played though? You won't notice a difference on GT7 because of how it looks to start with. Only have to load up a game like FF7 Rebirth and it's instantly noticeable.
The reason you are seeing shimmering on car interiors (in that setting) is that it is using ray tracing, which is a massive step up in visual realism but is expensive so the resolution is dropped a fair bit. I think the other modes still give PS5 Pro an advantage over PS5 so just use those if the trade offs for that setting aren't worth it for you. They are for me.
For me, biggest improvement by far: Elden Ring now gets a consistent 55-60fps in the DLC areas on performance.
Any PSSR title? What kind of TV are you using? I ask because this is the complete opposite of my experience while playing on an LG OLED G2. I suspect the panel could be an issue here.
I'm using a 2023 LG C2, 65".
I never said games don't look great. I just don't see any improvement with PSSR.
Uhh, hey fake news!
This is a very oddly framed article reporting on the news that Ubisoft has a PSSR patch in the works for AC Shadows, but this awful author is inserting her own narrative that it's already out and updated and that it was Sony's update.
PSSR is not yet updated again. AC Shadows is not yet using PSSR. It could be days or weeks or even months before we see the AC Shadows PSSR patch and for all Ubisoft has said, they've only worked with Sony, they didn't say PSSR itself is being updated based on the work they did to implement it into the game.
Reads like something a know biased PlayStation fanboy on YouTube would write to justify throwing their money away on something that's marginally better than PlayStation 5 base and especially series x.
No. It just reads like someone is making their own headline and conclusion. No need to fanboy this up, troll.
Dr. Serkan Toto says: While things do not look great for many studios in the West, things are very different in Japan – and I was shocked how little people in the industry still know and understand about the third biggest gaming market in the world (which is a probably a positive for a Japan game industry consultant like myself).
Honestly, it looks about the same if we are measuring a company's success on their all time high stock price. It has nothing to do with the sentiments some in the industry have.
Objectively the two biggest problems are cost cutting and consolidation.
best of board and best of arcade games (numbers 1 and 2 on the list) are not free, they are trial play games. single partial play through then you have to buy.
10. Frobisher Says! is pay to play if I recall.
hardly free downloads in the broader sense.
Made me think whatever happened to the PS Vita F2P "BigFest" game.
Most of them are match 3 puzzles and only few of them are good.. Rock Bosher DX was free on playstation mobile, when they moved it to PS Store, now it's paid and nothing is new at all :/