Grave Gamer News & Views — playstation 4

Sony’s Selling All of its Square Enix Shares to Return to Profitability

But, hey, the PlayStation 4 is still killing it

Japanese juggernaut Sony, most famous for the globally known PlayStation brand – and for also making, I don’t know, headphones and a few movies now and again – is dumping its entire financial stake out of publisher Square Enix.

Sony holds 9.52 million shares in Square Enix, a sensual tryst that began in the early 2000’s. Once upon a time ago, before the word “timed” preceded “exclusivity,” Square’s Final Fantasy brand was nearly synonymous with PlayStation, especially helping Sony claim the dominance in Japanese households it still enjoys to this very day.

Sony’s equity is priced at ¥4.8 billion yen, or $47 million. The deal is expected to be closed as soon as tomorrow. The decision is the next of several moves the company has made to return itself to profitability. Since 2014 began, Sony has laid off thousands of workers, sold two corporate offices, and has even axed its PC division.

On the upside, the Sony PlayStation 4 has reveled in sales success, having sold 7 million units worldwide since launch, surpassing its next-gen competition, the Xbox One, by a slim margin. As an aside, I am currently a happy member of that 7 million club and I sing my PS4 into a gentle sleep, nightly.

Major Improvements to Sharing and Streaming Coming to the PS4

Power to the people! Or, rather, power to the players! Wait, shit, that’s Gamestop’s slogan, isn’t it? They’re gonna be up my ass if I use that and they’ve already sued me the one time… Whatever, moving on. Point is, thanks to the PlayStation Nation’s feedback – as in your feedback – some pretty serious improvements are hitting the PS4’s Share functionality.

Coming soon via a patch, the PlayStation blog reports that a new video editor will be added that’ll let you “personalize your video clips” through use of a simple tool. Better yet, the update allows you to export screenshots and gameplay clips to a USB drive. Just hit share, choose your device, and you’re ready to rock. Hopefully this means we’ll have more avenues to share content than just Facebook.

Those who have been wishing for an alternative to capturing and streaming gameplay than the built-in Twitch/Ustream suite will be pleased as hell to learn that this very same update includes an “HDCP off” option, finally allowing gameplay capture via HDMI. The blog also promises even more unannounced features are being worked into this patch.

Sometime after that patch, Sony is planning yet another system software update that’ll integrate the ability to archive Twitch broadcasts. No more going live and having your sessions disappear into the ether. Additionally, Sony is looking to enhance streaming resolution to 720p. PC-less and capture device, uh, -less, I’m most excited by these upgrades (commence shameless plug: follow The Red Herb on Twitch!).

More info on these updates are said to follow in the weeks to come.

Just testing the share function on my PS4, folks. If you see this, I guess it’s safe to say it works.

Lookit this fancy ass future where I can rip gameplay videos with the press of a button… If I wanted to share the video only on Facebook. And so long as the last fifteen minutes was, by chance, interesting since you seemingly can’t edit captured footage....

Man From Future Enslaved By PlayStations Destroys PS4

Having witnessed his entire family captured and assimilated by the PlayStation 4’s sentient descendant – known in 2084 as “KillStations” – this Montreal man braved a wormhole through time in order to arrive at a Best Buy midnight event for Sony’s newly launched console.

With the images of his loved ones’ pained expressions still flashing before...

PlayStation 4 Will Support CD and MP3 Playback… Someday

Following fan outcry over the PS4’s inability to play MP3’s and CD’s as well as its lack of support for DLNA, Sony’s Worldwide figurehead Shuhei Yoshida confirmed the features will be worked into the system post-launch.

Gabbing it up on Giant Bomb’s Interview Dumptruck, Yoshida admits his entire team was surprised to hear such vehement feedback over a feature that, apparently, nobody really talks about.

“It’s not like we actively decided ‘let’s not do this feature so people will have to subscribe to Music Unlimited,’” said Shuhei. “The focus has been more on the game features. Some of the features we wanted but we couldn’t get in on day one.”

Yoshida goes on to say “the system guys” in Japan are already figuring out when to incorporate the omitted feature.

Sifting through IGN’s comments section on the issue, there seems to be some confusion as to why MP3 and CD playback, in particular, is a big deal; one user even quips that Sony was correct in thinking nobody cared about the feature, that they simply saw the other guys had it and demanded their fanboy informed console decision house the feature, too.

Let me clarify why MP3/CD playback is important to me: motherfuckin’ custom tracks, son. That’s it. I love jamming to my own tunes while I game. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like I’m masking Jack Wall’s score on Mass Effect or overlaying Stone Temple Pilots where Nobuo Uematsu should be. If I’m kicking on music, it’s usually to spice up the humdrum military anthems that accompany online sessions of Call of Duty or circumvent the head-on collisions caused when Skrillex splits my ear canal in Need for Speed.

Music Unlimited’s ability to play tunes during every game session leads me to believe that gone are the days of the PS3’s brutally selective custom track feature. Thanks for listening, Shuhei. Now knock your team’s heads together until the patch goes live.