PornHub’s traffic drops 90% (probably) as desperate gamers make mad e-dash to secure day one release of Sony’s new console

Hot off the heels of the PS5 streaming event last night, in which several new games were revealed, including Final Fantasy VI (a console exclusive, or perhaps not, more on that later) and a new God of War game (Ragnarok), the most important information regarding the PS5 systems was finally revealed: Price and availability.

PS5 will launch November 19th in the UK and will cost £449 for the full-fat disc version (matching the Xbox Series X for price) and the digital only system a surprisingly low £359.

These price points represents a resounding relief for console enthusiasts, as it was feared the machines could be significantly more costly – as much as £599 had been touted earlier this year – with delays to manufacturing due to the global pandemic and expensive internal components (particularly the custom SSD) being blamed. Fortunately, our fears were unfounded.

For the power of machine on offer in late 2020, I don’t think we could have hoped for much better price wise.

More games, more demos, and a load more unanswered questions

As well as the new games mentioned above we saw an impressive demo for Demon Souls (a PS3 remake), a largely cinematic slice of Spider-Man Miles Morales, a typically on-rails-and-therefore-boring-as-hell Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War demo, a fun looking Harry Potter Hogwarts RPG and a suitably creepy Resident Evil Village trailer, among a smattering of other games – for the most part previously announced.

Watch the presentation here:

Notable by their absence were Horizon Forbidden West, Gran Turismo 7 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

Most of the content was trailer based, although we were assured that all of the graphics were being rendered in realtime on PS5 hardware. Nevertheless, I still feel disappointed we haven’t yet seen more actual gameplay footage. Especially this close to release.

Most disappointingly however, was the lack of clarity with regard to exclusivity and release dates. Sony had promised many of the games on display were PS5 exclusive, yet it has now been confirmed that the majority of PS5s first party games will also come to PS4…Others will also appear on PC…Some may actually only be timed exclusives…

Bizarrely, Sony themselves seem confused as to exactly what’s coming out on what and when. So much so that the trailer for Demon Souls was hastily removed from YouTube and re-uploaded, sans the line at the end of the video that stated it was also coming to PC. Very odd.

Every UK retailer offering pre-orders sold out of their initial allocation in a matter of minutes.

Sony’s Jim Ryan had stated earlier this year: “We have always said that we believe in generations. We believe that when you go to all the trouble of creating a next-gen console, that it should include features and benefits that the previous generation does not include. And that, in our view, people should make games that can make the most of those features…whether it’s the DualSense controller, whether it’s the 3D audio, whether it’s the multiple ways that the SSD can be used… we are thinking that it is time to give the PlayStation community something new, something different, that can really only be enjoyed on PS5.”

Despite this strong message of intent it seems that Sony is now happy to follow Microsoft’s lead and compromise the potential cutting edge technological quality of their first party lineup, at least for now, to guarantee current-gen customers are not left out. An understandable concession given that there are approximately 110 million PS4s in the wild, but disappointing nonetheless for those of us who crave the that full-on “next-gen” experience from the get go.

As for release dates? Many games demoed so far still have no release date attached to them – not even an approximate release window. Launch day? 2020? 2021? 2022?? Sadly, we’re still in the dark on this.

Pre-order chaos

Sony had asserted that pre-orders would not appear out of the blue: “It’s not going to happen with a minute’s notice. We’re going to at some point let you know when you can pre-order a PS5 so please don’t feel like you have to go run and line up anywhere until you receive official notice on how that will work.” Said Eric Lempel, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Sony.

But that’s exactly what happened. Once the Japanese giant had sent out a casual tweet saying pre-orders would go live some time today well, all hell broke loose.

In the early hours following the digital event retailers, undoubtedly keen to get PS5 offers live as early as possible to soak up that initial high demand, published their PS5 preorder pages. I doubt however they could have expected just how high the demand was going to be.

Every one of them was overwhelmed during the chaos, as servers struggled to cope with the unprecedented level of demand, with all initial PS5 allocations sold out in just a few minutes.

Amazon, Very, AO.com, Currys, GAME – they all show both editions of PS5, as well as every bundle that includes the console + accessories, as unavailable or sold out as of this writing – in fact many now don’t show a PS5 listing page at all!

I can confirm from personal experience that Amazon went live with pre-orders just after 9am and by 9.30am all their units were gone. I was lucky enough to secure a pre-order, along with PC Zoner Brad Smith. Zone writer Greg Marshall however was sadly not so lucky.

Should we be THIS excited about PS5??

I always get excited about cutting-edge gaming tech, and console launches are no exception.

I have to admit though, nothing I’ve seen from Sony or Microsoft so far has made me feel like I desperately need one of their new machines before the year is out.

The demos we’ve seen so far have been inconsistent graphically and mostly trailer based, which does nothing to effectively demonstrate the qualities of the major technological shift on offer. With very little actual gameplay or cutting edge technologies front and centre to truly wow us it’s a hard sell – especially as there are no major exclusive launch day games to get excited about.

In fact, the only “next-gen” demo that I’ve seen this year that truly excited me about where games are headed was the Unreal Engine 5 demo released back in May – running on PS5 no less. Now THAT’s next gen!

If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is in all its glory:

New generations require new levels of experience to truly justify their existence. Sure, we’re getting ray tracing (or some form of it in a bunch of games, whether it be shadows or reflections or full on path tracing, it varies a lot) but beyond that I’m not seeing a huge difference in the gameplay experience In the games on show so far.

The act of getting in and out of games will improve dramatically of course, with super fast SSDs finally making their console debut, as well as a strong CPU core design (not seen since the Cell processor in the PS3) which should enrich the sophistication of game simulation.

But until we get a chance to sit down with a proper next-gen title (like one that uses Unreal Engine 5 as showcased above) we’re just going to to have to make do with half-and-half titles that need to work on previous gen systems as well.

For Holiday 2020, that means games that look a bit glossier and are fasting at loading, but not much else.

Having said all that, I am still relieved I got my damn pre-order in…