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Sony invests $250 million in Epic Games

DinoD

Member
LOL.

So for the first time ever, Sony and Epic got together right after his PS5 demo he supposedly did as a nice neighbour favour and crunched a $250 million deal in 7 weeks.

Ya sure Tim.

Yeah. It doesn't seem too plausible. We'll never know for sure. Anyway. All this fanboyism aside. Within a year or two, we will know where strenghts of each console lie.
 

Shmunter

Member
Its honestly hard to tell what sony get out of this tbh.

Epic wont make UE5 amazing for sony and suck for everyone else, its not good for business.

Epic wont make fortnite exclusive to sony.

If Epic ever makes another game, it may be sony exclusive.

But honestly, i dont see what advantage it gives them unless they get a share of the Epic profits. But for 250million, it doesnt buy much.
As you say first rights to Epic games and content. Discounted or free Epic engine licensing. Slice of company dividends.

Epic 5 running best on PS5 would be down to hardware architectural decisions matching the next gen engine ambitions, not deliberate sabotage of other platforms.
 

MastaKiiLA

Member
LOL.

So for the first time ever, Sony and Epic got together right after his PS5 demo he supposedly did as a nice neighbour favour and crunched a $250 million deal in 7 weeks.

Ya sure Tim.
If UE5 was proof of concept type stuff, then it's completely valid. There might or might not have been discussions of potential investment incentives prior to the demo, but we don't know that for certain. These kinds of deals can happen in a matter of days or weeks. With Sweeney being high in the Epic org chart, it's not difficult to get something like that approved in a short amount of time. The dollar value is high for an individual, but apparently fairly small for both companies.

The furor raised over anything Sweeney says is just console war noise. People take this stuff too seriously, when it's really just business for the actual players.
 
Its honestly hard to tell what sony get out of this tbh.

Epic wont make UE5 amazing for sony and suck for everyone else, its not good for business.

Epic wont make fortnite exclusive to sony.

If Epic ever makes another game, it may be sony exclusive.

But honestly, i dont see what advantage it gives them unless they get a share of the Epic profits. But for 250million, it doesnt buy much.
Exactly. But, you're being too reasonable. You're looking at it from a business perspective. Try looking at it from a scorn, fanboy point of view... you'll get it after that. So many hurt butts.
 
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If anything that kind of makes the whole demo a bit more a move to secure investment funding from Sony. I.e he already said the demo was a result of years of collaborative effort between them and Sony. So you take that, and also factor Epic have already seen their newer tech used by companies like Disney on projects like The Mandalorian.

Epic is looking to expand their reach outside of just games, and who's already there with a healthy gaming platform AND film/television production studios on top of? The same company they've already leveraged to showcase their engines for two decades now: Sony.

So I'm honestly not buying Sweeney's suggestion that this investment only came about after the UE5 demo was completed. If anything, the results of that might've just locked in Sony's decision to invest that $250 million that they were perhaps considering anyway before then. And another thing being, that UE5 demo..it wouldn't have to of been until it was literally finished and then put out to the public for Sony to decide it was enticing enough to place in their investment. By Sweeney's own words, that demo's been the result of years of collaboration between the two, so for all we know the initial process of setting up the investment could've came months before May, realistically speaking.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
giphy.webp


Everything makes perfect sense now, no comments needed Tim.
 
You guys sound fucking desperate after this news from Sony (not even PlayStation). Now Microsoft has to do things to make xbox fans to feel better?

Does daddy phill have to reassure you again? You look like babies.

This thread is but a collection of feel good about posts from plausible "even broken clocks are right twice a day" fanboys who were slighted and felt the heat after Sweeny and company put a dagger to their favorite's box "momentum" and shifted the conversation completely. That's an unforgettable sin. Can't say I don't enjoy the show.
 

Krappadizzle

Gold Member
Step 1. Give epic money
Step 2. Put PS Exclusives on EGS
Step 3. ???
Step 4. I CAN FINALLY PLAY BLOODBORNE AND GOD OF WAR AT A GOOD FRAME RATE.
 

Snake29

RSI Employee of the Year
200.gif


Jesus dude, relax. Or go back to bed and get out of the right side lol.

Maybe you should go to bed, and start thinking about this investment by Sony Corp as a whole and not PlayStation only. I gave some examples a few pages back. You guys think that every fart they make is to start a console war or something.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
so for all we know the initial process of setting up the investment could've came months before May, realistically speaking.

... and still after the bulk of the work on UE5 was well underway, but this proxy war against anyone that speaks well about PS5 must not care for things like that.

If we want to apply the same metric people are trying to apply here, financial deal == he lied and exaggerated to make PS5 look good, then we need to take any statement by any company/individual either MS or Sony has a financial bond with (that removes all PR documents, all first party developers, all DF interviews [given by company employees]) and also take published specs as completely theoretical peaks with unknown bottlenecks in sight.

Not that crazy and leaves the forum with little to talk about until well after both of the consoles launch.
 

Stuart360

Member
... and still after the bulk of the work on UE5 was well underway, but this proxy war against anyone that speaks well about PS5 must not care for things like that.

If we want to apply the same metric people are trying to apply here, financial deal == he lied and exaggerated to make PS5 look good, then we need to take any statement by any company/individual either MS or Sony has a financial bond with (that removes all PR documents, all first party developers, all DF interviews [given by company employees]) and also take published specs as completely theoretical peaks with unknown bottlenecks in sight.

Not that crazy and leaves the forum with little to talk about until well after both of the consoles launch.
Oh come on now. If Epic had been creaming over XSX, and then Microsoft gave them $250mil, there would be so many conspiracy theories that even Alex Jones would be facepalming. In fact even without the money part, conspiracies would be abound. I mean look at Digital Foundry.
 

TLZ

Banned
Obviously deal like this was in discussion for long time now....so we should take all epic quotes about next gen consoles with a pinch of salt
I see what you're saying, but what if this investment was particularly made to help them push their next gen unreal engine tech further? Maybe Sony are that serious about making game development for the PS5 that much better than the competition, so enticing developers to use UE5 for PS5 and see how easy it is to develop for, and make great looking games for it.

Maybe. That's the hopeful person in me thinking.
 

pasterpl

Member
Good work Sony, you have now given Xbox fans a 'get out of jail free' card now if UE5 performs better on PS5, whether its related to this or not. :messenger_tears_of_joy:

it would be funnier if ue5 would end up performing better on xbsex

UE5, ratchet rift apart and horzion 2 are just a taste of what is coming and they are a solid evidence of that tech. Look at inFAmous Second Son then look at Ghost, wow factor will be greater than that in the next generation of playstation. While series X will lack such hype simply because they are limited by a service based subscription and limited by last gen architecture. You like it or not PS5 and its exclusives are revolutionary in terms of gaming development.

so much fud in one post is really impressive achievement
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Oh come on now. If Epic had been creaming over XSX, and then Microsoft gave them $250mil, there would be so many conspiracy theories that even Alex Jones would be facepalming. In fact even without the money part, conspiracies would be abound. I mean look at Digital Foundry.

Sure, people take shots at some people in DF because of things actually said being not much more than unfounded concern trolling (then again people cheering here and trying to claim a high mora ground never had problems with DF or saw any connection there) .
People took shots at the UE5 demo and what was said after because their mental picture of PS5 being underpowered.

Some people yelled financial deal as soon as they saw the logo (running on PS5 HW) as mostly a reaction to discredit it ASAP, not because they saw through the veil or had actual reasons to doubt what the engineers working on it or the developers commenting it were saying. The fan community shouted money hats, devs online seemed mostly wowed and impressed.
 
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Ar¢tos

Member
LOL@ the Neverending conspiracy theories...
250m is less than the budget for a Sony AAA game (dev + marketing), its pocket change for both companies, its hardly a serious investment.
Also Sony =/= SIE
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
We all know Sony put a great deal of focus on their SSD I/O solution, but my issue in this constantly being mentioned is that some folks who do it, do such with the accompanying baggage of downplaying Microsoft's solution
I do admit I see your statements often seen through those particularly tinted glasses, but I disagree there is this widespread focus on Sony’s SSD and I/O solution to unfairly downplay MS’s one.

I do not see much of you turning your attention to the 12 TFLOPS focus with the baggage of downplay Sony’s solution comparing apples to oranges with a different company tactic, etc... etc... for perhaps obvious reasons and this climate of warring amongst factions that has surely strained you too like it has strained a lot of us when the constant shouting off the roof tops PR quoting, astroturfing, accusations of bias, technical misquoting, technical selective quoting and stretching, etc... it can make the life of those seeking more understanding just a bit more maddening.

So this news coming to light about the investment of $250 million by Sony, at least that clears the air a bit on a very strong motivating factor that most likely (assuming Occam's Razor theory) be at some root to Sweeney's statements the past month or two. And some of his statements, like saying the UE5 demo would only be possible on PS5, well now we can see they have a lot of PR fluff built into them even if in some ways they are technically true.

Sure, in a partnership like that both sides tend not to focus on the negatives but more on the positives, but as you said the technical statements can still be true no matter the PR fluff on top of it. This is what the “marketing deal” shouting crowd is fighting for: not to expose the PR fluff, but to ensure people discredit what you yourself said can be true assessments about the PS5 HW.

How much genuine game logic is running in that flying segment? Virtually none. There are no enemies, probably not much in the way of physics, no game mechanics at play etc. Since on PS5 the dedicated processor in the I/O block has DMA to the system RAM, that also means when it is transferring data from storage to RAM (or vice-versa), the CPU and GPU have to wait. That's a tradeoff in a hUMA architecture design (it's also a reason the I/O block has the cache coherency engines and is using a smaller SRAM cache instead of larger DRAM cache (speed/latency)). But in what real gameplay scenario do you expect the system to spend an entire 30 consecutive frames simply streaming in 8K texture data from storage to RAM to then get crunched by the GPU? It's not going to happen!

Sure, we discussed high level of how one component writing to memory, both systems have a hybrid unified memory solution (with plenty of local cache and scratchpad memory) to make contention less of a problem than it seems. How much game logic was running? Well, more than what we fear and less than what we think we should expect I guess.

That was a scripted moment so there was no player control, but I think we are over-estimating how much RAN bandwidth the SSD sucks awayand how little CPU and GPU work there is in that scene to have the character follow the scripted path, have the mesh animate realistically, the cloth render and follow the body properly, the high quality blur, and overall environment rendering.

Assuming XvA has most of the features of PS5's SSD I/O (and at least all of the key features; already discussed that cache coherency engines are not necessarily "key" features since those are more due to a requirement specifically of Sony's design to ensure it works properly),
An assumption one could make and there are reason to assume it is not correct too or that it needs to be expanded upon to see more context. Cache coherency engines being there ensure correctness at such high speed but also ensure a reduction in stalls as you are dealing with a massively parallel cluster of cores (if you take the Zen 2 cores and their private caches and the DCU’s and their private caches too as nodes in a cluster) and try to ensure there is w coherent view of memory and you are not wasting tons of bandwidth with pure snooping/cache coherency traffic alone.

Other bits like the cache scrubbers were again highlighted as an efficiency measure to ensure that, as massive data is streamed in and out, only the essential data is flushed from caches reducing traffic and maximising caching efficiency and hit rate (you avoid flushing out an entire section of cache and thus cause a miss for a load later on that could have been avoided).

Fact is that both consoles seem to have seen a similar R&D budget and Sony put more of HW and SW R&D into the I/O solution and less on the GPU itself than MS did. Both companies think they have done good enough with the area they invested less in and they see it as more pragmatic / an issue of diminishing returns. Time will tell.. possibly they are both right and wrong.

More importantly though is that one thing MS have consistently mentioned regarding XvA is high granularity in specifically choosing ONLY the texture asset actually required; Sony's solution is obviously faster in sheer numbers but in this specific area seems to have less a focus on granular/selective load targeting of specific texture data (or portions of texture data) to stream to memory, it favors a different approach good in its own way however.
This is your personal interpretation/assumption again and you are entitled to it of course, but it is an assumption based on one company putting a bit more PR around it. MS certainly did good with SFS making it more democratic / easier to implement virtual texturing schemes (what you call “choose only the texture asset actually required”), but they do not hold exclusive rights of use: PRT / virtual texturing was a thing well before (just look at how texture handling worked on say PS2, look at the core tech behind Mega Texturing, look at Tiled Resources, etc...).

Whether it is important or inconsequential for all intents and purposes (and without comparing it with other approaches), with PS5 you are dealing with 5.5 GB/s of raw bandwidth with actually the ability to reduce latency and pipeline multiple requests in parallel (hello non standard 6 [thanks for the correction, I mixed up my numbers there for a sec thicc_girls_are_teh_best thicc_girls_are_teh_best ] priority levels for data requests), 8-9 GB/s of average compressed equivalent bandwidth, and support to load ONLY the texture assets that are actually required.
 
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FranXico

Member
Get The Facts!

The PS5 is dogshit. Why? Because 12 > 10*. Anybody in the whole world who says they like the PS5 or anything good about it MUST BE LYING! SONY BRIBED THEM!
If only we could trust those devs to be as forthcoming as all those Xbox indie devs with exclusivity deals. Those do speak THE TRUTH.

Well, here is the proof! Sony BRIBED EVERYBODY. This proves that THE PS5 IS SHIT! Nobody would ever say anything good about it unless they got bribed!

And shame on you, you filthy conspiracy theorists, for questioning the integrity of Sir Richard Leadbetter. All those videos and commentary of LEGITIMATE CONCERN ABOUT THE PUNY PS5 CAPABILITIES are a lot of hard work!

/s
 

pasterpl

Member
LOL@ the Neverending conspiracy theories...
250m is less than the budget for a Sony AAA game (dev + marketing), its pocket change for both companies, its hardly a serious investment.
Also Sony =/= SIE

250M sounds About right for some Serious publicity

/s

on a serious note, I doubt that Sony paid epic this amount for some pr, but it is naive to think that knowing about this investment in the pipeline didn’t have impact on what epic was saying, the truth is somewhere in the middle

reality is that we know that eg. Bloober team got some $$$ from ms so anything they say is never 100% objective, same should apply to epic
 
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pasterpl

Member
Get The Facts!

The PS5 is dogshit. Why? Because 12 > 10*. Anybody in the whole world who says they like the PS5 or anything good about it MUST BE LYING! SONY BRIBED THEM!
If only we could trust those devs to be as forthcoming as all those Xbox indie devs with exclusivity deals. Those do speak THE TRUTH.

Well, here is the proof! Sony BRIBED EVERYBODY. This proves that THE PS5 IS SHIT! Nobody would ever say anything good about it unless they got bribed!

And shame on you, you filthy conspiracy theorists, for questioning the integrity of Sir Richard Leadbetter. All those videos and commentary of LEGITIMATE CONCERN ABOUT THE PUNY PS5 CAPABILITIES are a lot of hard work!

/s

so I am guessing that no one can say that anyone is biased, understood, so we should flag any posts saying that DF is biased, or any 3rd party devs that got publishing deals with platform holders. I have noticed that people are extremely selective in what they call biased opinion.
 

SleepDoctor

Banned
250M sounds About right for some Serious publicity

/s

on a serious note, I doubt that Sony paid epic this amount for some pr, but it is naive to thing that knowing about this investment in the pipeline didn’t have impact on what epic was saying, the truth is somewhere in the middle

reality is that we know that eg. Bloober team got some $$$ from ms so anything they say is never 100% objective, same should apply to epic


Its only fun when its Microsoft money hatting things.

Regardless of what its exactly for...... its a conflict of interest. But again, nobody with common sense is surprised at the news at all.
 
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Psykodad

Banned
I didn't know PS5 SDK is the same as Xbox Series X /s
Never said it is. But UE5 will work that way.

If a game requires the max amount of data for PS5 SSD to be loaded and XSX can only move half in the same timeframe (because that's how it is), there's something that needs to be adjusted accordingly.
Which UE5 will do automatically.

After all, isn't that precisely what they've been talking about during the tech-demo?
 

Ar¢tos

Member
250M sounds About right for some Serious publicity

/s

on a serious note, I doubt that Sony paid epic this amount for some pr, but it is naive to think that knowing about this investment in the pipeline didn’t have impact on what epic was saying, the truth is somewhere in the middle

reality is that we know that eg. Bloober team got some $$$ from ms so anything they say is never 100% objective, same should apply to epic
It's really dumb how people still think Playstation = entire Sony and Xbox = entire MS.
What can Sony get from a small investment in a company that mainly does a game engine with a side investment in a storefront, and a couple of games?
Playstation studios prefer their own engines and their games seldom release on pc and never day one.
Maybe partnering with Playstation was a way to get more attention from another Sony department completely unrelated to gaming.
Playstation gets a free promo and Epic gets a showcase to get a deal with Sony Pictures, for example. Epic has been trying to get Unreal Engine to be more relevant in the movies business and a 250m investment makes more sense there (engine licensing for CG, SDK, support, etc) . On the Playstation side it makes little sense, only a couple of their studios use UE and 250m is quite a small investment in that area for the size of Epic and Playstation (as a Sony division).
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Get The Facts!

The PS5 is dogshit. Why? Because 12 > 10*. Anybody in the whole world who says they like the PS5 or anything good about it MUST BE LYING! SONY BRIBED THEM!
If only we could trust those devs to be as forthcoming as all those Xbox indie devs with exclusivity deals. Those do speak THE TRUTH.

Well, here is the proof! Sony BRIBED EVERYBODY. This proves that THE PS5 IS SHIT! Nobody would ever say anything good about it unless they got bribed!

And shame on you, you filthy conspiracy theorists, for questioning the integrity of Sir Richard Leadbetter. All those videos and commentary of LEGITIMATE CONCERN ABOUT THE PUNY PS5 CAPABILITIES are a lot of hard work!

/s

This is kind of the argument some of the :lol reactions are making routinely ;).
 

Handy Fake

Member
I wonder why they did invest $250M on them. To secure good PS5 support on UE5? It was already happening.
To secure PS5 support on Fortnite? I assume it was already happening.

Maybe it's mostly to secure a good PS5 Fortnite port and get its marketing deal on console with console bundles and so on(while keeping it multi), and to secure MS doesn't get exclusive console stuff they may pay for. Maybe to get a discounted UE5 license for 3rd party PS5 indies? Maybe it's just an investment because they think Epic will earn a lot of money with UE5 because its future looks great because it's getting a great market share specially they're now opening to cinema and tv series too and Fortnite seems to have legs? Because other than that, I don't see why Sony would need to pay that much money to Epic.

Why do you think Sony paid that?
Because if you buy shares in a tech company before they release a revolutionary product, then when that product is released the value of those shares go up.
If I had some spare coin then I'd have invested in a few Epic shares. Doesn't mean I want anything in return bar the hope for an increase in my share price. 1.5% of a company's shares is small change and won't give you the lickings of a dog, nevermind any sort of preferential treatment.

Pretty standard tech investment for a return on profits. I think this lockdown has got some folk going conspiracy mad.
 
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FranXico

Member
This is kind of the argument some of the :lol reactions are making routinely ;).
Nobody's word should be taken at face value, that's all.

Sweeny has his deals with Sony, and it's fine to look at his statements under a different light.
But a lot of the people who rushed to call out the dishonesty of Epic are looking the other way when another company benefits from the same kind of marketing propaganda.
 

quest

Not Banned from OT
Nobody's word should be taken at face value, that's all.

Sweeny has his deals with Sony, and it's fine to look at his statements under a different light.
But a lot of the people who rushed to call out the dishonesty of Epic are looking the other way when another company benefits from the same kind of marketing propaganda.
Give me a call when a multiplatform engine maker does this and lies to cover it up lol. its ok to admit you were wrong and others could read between the lines. When a multiplatform engine maker goes on a world press tour for one side and treats the other like Voldemort it was easy to see. Next you might be able to spot it. Always assume companies have an agenda.
 
You guys sound fucking desperate after this news from Sony (not even PlayStation). Now Microsoft has to do things to make xbox fans to feel better?

Does daddy phill have to reassure you again? You look like babies.

I think it can be worrisome when a first party buys a stake in a third party engine because you're not exactly sure what benefits they will get out of it as a minority owner.

Do they get first access to the tech?
Do they get access to engine data on competitors games?
Do they get custom features that benefit only their hardware?
Will all future engine marketing be shown running on Sony hardware?

So yeah, if I was MS I'd give this the stink eye.
 
UE5, ratchet rift apart and horzion 2 are just a taste of what is coming and they are a solid evidence of that tech. Look at inFAmous Second Son then look at Ghost, wow factor will be greater than that in the next generation of playstation. While series X will lack such hype simply because they are limited by a service based subscription and limited by last gen architecture. You like it or not PS5 and its exclusives are revolutionary in terms of gaming development.
do you even grammatics, bro?
 
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