You're right. There isn't any evidence that Sonys was interested in acquiring Zenimax. And it would indeed differ quite a lot from their usual buyouts.

Though I do think coolbeans has a point in that Sony probably won't restrain themselves from buying 3rd parties if it makes sense business wise.
And IF both Microsoft and Sony were to bid on a company like Zenimax, Sony obviously would have a hard time matching Microsoft's war chest.

Looks like Black Ops Cold War has a minimum of 285GB of storage for the #PS5

Activision wanting COD to be the only game people play

Well I think that's fundamentally it. Financially and strategically a buyout like that doesn't seem like a good fit for Sony.

It makes sense for MS who are going multiplatform with their software, abandoning the need for traditional hardware and shifting their efforts to streaming.

Do companies not negotiate for the rights to enter into exclusive talks to buyout a company, giving time to broker a deal so other companies can't counter offer? I don't think(but correct me if I'm wrong) that's it's simply like going to an auction.

Yep, buying insomniac and interviews with they saying they are looking to buy other devs it is certain that they can buy other 3rd parties (and Jim didn't say they wouldn't buy other devs, just said they look from organically instead of indiscriminate buyouts).

That is humungous, thanks god I don't intend to buy it.

Sure we can stop the discussion.

Companies sign NDA so they can't disclose, discuss or anything related to the negotiation to any other company, person, etc (which prevents biding war and interferences) so I don't think they also sign saying they won't negotiate with any other company at the same time.

Exactly. Sony buying Zenimax would be far from their modus operandi which has always been to acquire smaller partners. Makes much more sense for Microsoft.

AT&T has recently tried to sell both WB Games and Crunchyroll. With WB Games, it seemed like bidding was open for a range of different companies while with Crunchyroll, Sony has obtained the exclusive right to negotiate.

I guess that no company was interested in paying anywhere near the $4b that AT&T wanted for WB Games and thus no company entered exclusive negotiations?

Next week, Target will have a B2G1 deal in the US (link).

That's neat. If you're buying 2 launch games, you might as well pick a 3rd for free.

@Bandorr Good point. Better wait till you've seen what games they have before cancelling existing preorders.

11 seconds to boot. I'm not even sure my TV will be ready in that time.

So RedGamingTech has a new video up with a undisclosed developer on the PS5 indepth specs. Take with a grain of salt and more of a rumour until we have Sony come out and state more technical details. His source comes from someone who supposedly has a PS5 dev kit.

Big info dump from the Youtuber, don't take as gospel.. more like a rumour :P

• No large cache on board but has cache coherency to offset lower memory bandwidth - not infinity cache though should give comparable results. IC on silicon will also offset narrower bus in the APU somewhat, its a "priority and need basis"
• Zen 2 CPU but with 8MB shared L3 Cache - akin to Zen 3 shared CCX design
• Low level 8-bit and 4-bit integer operation support. Essentially can be used for machine learning. We kind of know this since AMD's Big Navi announcement with features like Super Resolution which is destined for both PC and consoles
• GPU frequency can throttle down to 2100Mhz under very CPU intensive workloads - though this very rare and will be at full speed most of the time as per Mark Cerny technical breakdown
• Geometry Engine is built into the APU in-house and totally custom by Sony. Optional for the developers to use, however its being encouraged to be used from Sony to developers; with documentation and demos.
  • Not many launch games use or leverage the GE in the first wave, likely will see more developers use it in the PS5's 2nd year or even 3rd year (for third parties especially)
  • Will be good for VR and open world games
  • Sony's implementation puts GE earlier in the pipeline using primitive shaders (hardware based vs 'Paul cuts out') or their equivalent of mesh shaders in RDNA2. Essentially Sony's implementation culls polys earlier in the process which saves a tonne in performance and offers more options in programmability of polygons and vertices. Also has VRR, which again is the same, by being done earlier in the process gives devs more control. Gripe is that harder to utilize over DX's equivalent/s for both and will take devs a while to understand and effectively use GE.