Sony invests $250 million in Epic Games [2020-07-09]

[Ronaldo8]

Sweeney has been bitching a lot about closed ecosystems. If you go to his twitter there is good chunk of apple needs to open up their platform. Sweeney similarly got upset to MS for their store and possibly locking out third party stores similar to what mobile platforms already do. After MS stated there is no intention to close down windows sweeney was a happy camper.

There is many tweets from sweeney in relation to apple. This is one of them

https://twitter.com/x/status/1273088984139382784

So Sweeney has been complaining about closed systemsand all the while moneyhatting devs/publishers left and right for exclusivity in his very own little garden? How cute.
Sweeney is a businessman. If MS paid him for it, he would be extolling the virtues of excel if need be, which is why him blowing smoke up Sony should have rung a bell.

 

[Ronaldo8]

Don’t get caught up in console wars. 250M May have bought them some good marketing; but it won’t change the core of their business. Epic is worth too much.

It's kickback for "unintentional" marketing.

 

[HBRU]

Is it not eyebrow raising for first party platform to have stake in an engine that most companies use? MS uses unreal engine the most. Is it not unethical for sony to do something like this?

I hate how the big players seems to increasingly be trying to monopolize what is essentially third party stuff. Dont they have enough of their own resources. Its like they are in a race to see how devoid of life they can make the gaming industry

Sony just see value.
It's a Company [emoji854]

 

[orangpelupa]

sony also not just about video games. Their movie / tv series arm could benefit too.

EDIT: they also have stage6. so the VFX could be better (maybe making UE even more user-friendly with movie making, improving what they did with mandalorian, etc) even with their limited budget.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think development of cheap visual effects is a priority for media as it's getting very expensive.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I think development of cheap visual effects is a priority for media as it's getting very expensive.

Yup. Although tools like Unreal Engine make CGI for TV more accessible than evert, there is a constant desire to do more impressive things visually. Game of Thrones set an insane benchmark for modern TV.

 

[iroboto]

anything that can bring the costs down is going to help for sure.
Tools investment is a big thing, and it's going to continue to be a big thing, anything that can save on labour, compute costs, storage costs, bandwidth costs; sadly the company I work at, we've built our own internal hadoop cluster for data mining, but none of it is stored in parquet format, all of it sitting uncompressed.

lol.... we're loading hundreds of TB a day of telecommunications data into there. I don't know what they are thinking. Thank god we're not using an external provider, downloading uncompressed data is going to bankrupt our monopolistic business.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

This could just be Sony finding a way to finance R&D for unreal engine to take advantage of their uniquely faster I/O, as well as developing the necessary PS5-focused tools.
With no money directly involved, Epyc as a multiplatform engine developer could just work on UE5 and later for the minimum common denominator and call it a day.

Game of Thrones set an insane benchmark for modern TV.

The only good thing GoT ultimately did was teach people not to get too invested in entertainment media.
/rant

 

[fehu]

Game of Thrones set an insane benchmark for modern TV.

Wasn't the new bland Lion King done on Unity?

 

[manux]

So Sweeney has been complaining about closed systemsand all the while moneyhatting devs/publishers left and right for exclusivity in his very own little garden? How cute.
Sweeney is a businessman. If MS paid him for it, he would be extolling the virtues of excel if need be, which is why him blowing smoke up Sony should have rung a bell.

The same sweeney that open sourced unreal engine and will open source unreal5 engine? The same sweeney that doesn't require you to pay any licence fees for projects that made less than 1M$ revenue? You can take unreal from open source, do whatever you like with it, sell your thing outside epic store and if you made less than 1M$ revenue then you pay nothing to epic. And if you happen to make a lot of money and sell through epic store sweeney doesn't double dip. It's only store cut no engine licence fee in that case.

Indeed, sweeney is evil. We need less of the things he is pushing for. Less I say!

 

[London Geezer]

Wasn't the new bland Lion King done on Unity?

I’d be gobsmacked if that were the case.

 

[manux]

I believe they used realtime graphics + ar/vr to frame the shots in lion king. But they didn't render the movie in same engine that was used for realtime composition.

 

[iroboto]

I’d be gobsmacked if that were the case.

The prototyping of the movie was done in Unity.

Final render was not.

 

[MrFox]

The biggest use of unreal for sony would be gaming related, the second biggest would be film sets (virtual sets), and the third would be pre-production.

Real time engines are sometimes used in pre-production to make quick animatics. Today it's also used right on the set with real time VFX and compositing. It allows the director to see what a take will look like with everything in it on his monitor, and the virtual sets are all using Unreal, as far as I know.

https://onsetfacilities.com/real-time-compositing-and-vfx/

 

[manux]

This video shows the virtual camera, vr stuff and real time rendering lion king used. It's great to actually see in vr instead of trying to setup camera in 2d screen.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

anything that can bring the costs down is going to help for sure.

I probably didn't express myself well, I don't think costs are coming down exactly but I think studios are getting more pizzaz for their dollar. We've come a long way since Star Trek's pappmaché boulders!

The use of hardware and software accessible to consumers being used for the production of TV shows is not a new thing at all, the visual FX for Babylon 5 were initially done on Commodore Amigas, Lightwave and NewTek's Video Toaster.

 

[BRiT]

Dang you @DSoup , you make me wish for a Babylon-5 remaster with new and improved visual effects. Maybe a bit of a remake touch to it during late Season 4 and Season 5 to take care of pacing issues.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Dang you @DSoup , you make me wish for a Babylon-5 remaster with new and improved visual effects. Maybe a bit of a remake touch to it during late Season 4 and Season 5 to take care of pacing issues.

You and me both! It's surprising there hasn't even been a low-effort remaster with re-rendered HD special-effects sequences. Babylon 5 remains one of my favourite sci-fi shows of all time. Writing the whole story arc up front allowed them to lay groundwork for latter seasons exceptionally well.

What paramount did with Star Trek the Next Generation Blu-ray release was amazing and I wish Babylon 5 had that treatment.

 

[manux]

Dang you @DSoup , you make me wish for a Babylon-5 remaster with new and improved visual effects. Maybe a bit of a remake touch to it during late Season 4 and Season 5 to take care of pacing issues.

There is this patreon from Straczynski that might lead to something. It's not yet concrete enough for me to donate money.

https://www.patreon.com/syntheticworlds

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think getting costs down through realtime graphics is going to be key. I was thinking the other day that now that Disney have Marvel, a live-action XMen TV series could be made. And then I realised the effects would be pretty extreme. Recreating that universe is a lot easier in animation than cinema. If the visuals could be produced in realtime, that might make it cost effective.