Yahoo Finance reviews the PlayStation 5
Yahoo Finance's Alexis Christoforous and Dan Howley discuss the PlayStation 5.
Video transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Electronic Arts has entered a new phase of its public life as a more mature company. They announced today they're gonna be paying a dividend, even though financial results were weaker than expected. The stock is getting slammed. Our tech editor Dan Howley here with more. Were you surprised to hear that they're gonna be doing this with the dividend?
DAN HOWLEY: I was, actually. This is something that you haven't seen from a lot of gaming companies. They're one of the only handful of big name game companies that actually are listed publicly. If you look, you know, it's basically Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and then EA, Activision Blizzard, and Take-Two. There aren't many beyond that.
They also, it's worth noting, have tons of studios under them each. So it's not as though it's just those individuals. There's tons of developers in that category.
But it was interesting-- and you know, just to look at EA's earnings for the quarter, they were surprisingly disappointing with revenue falling 14% for the quarter. And that kind of speaks to a broader issue of does that mean that pandemic spending on gaming is gonna be going down? I don't necessarily see that happening, because there's still nothing to do, really. Right?
A lot of places still aren't fully opened or opened in small capacities. People aren't really comfortable, necessarily, going out and doing things that they may have been prior to the pandemic. So I think gaming is still gonna continue to do well.
We recently saw that Activision Blizzard crushed on their earnings. So it's not necessarily an industry-wide indication. But EA did not release one of its titles that it has during the quarter, "FIFA," which is a global powerhouse. So that could also be part of the reason why they were off so much.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, want to get to Sony PlayStation 5, out November 12. You took it for a test drive. Is it worth our time and our money?
DAN HOWLEY: OK, hold on. Let me just-- [GUTTURAL YELL]
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: [CHUCKLES]
DAN HOWLEY: All right. Woof. This is the PlayStation 5. It is absolutely massive. The way I describe it is it looks like the love child between a 1980s VCR and an alien--
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: That's perfect.
DAN HOWLEY: --because that's basically what it is. It retails for $499 for this version with the disk drive. There's an all-digital version that is $399.
The big deal with this is upgraded graphics, art-- ray-tracing technology-- basically, it makes light look more realistic when you're in a game. That makes the game overall look more realistic. The storage drive on this is a custom solid-state drive.
Basically, it's one of the fastest that's around, period. So games load like [SNAPS FINGERS] that. I mean, I-- you know, I have a PlayStation 4. I have all the systems, because it's me. But the PlayStation 4 takes forever to load certain games, like "Spider-Man," for instance.
This bad boy-- [SNAPS FINGERS] it's instant. It really does feel like it's out of this world. And then, in between loading different levels, there's no waiting there. It's just a split second, and you're done.
The only downside to this system is the storage right now, because it comes with less than a terabyte. It's around 800-something gigabytes. Games can go as high, as far as storage, as 100, 110 gigabytes. So you're not gonna have that much space. They are saying, though, that they are gonna allow for expandable storage in the future.
And then one of the things I just really quickly want to point out is the controller-- big, big upgrade here-- adaptive triggers, and essentially what that means is if you want to press a gas pedal in a game, you're gonna feel resistance from the actual trigger on the controller. So it really does feel like you're in a game now.
