The PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X might be affected in the delays caused by the coronavirus. (The Outer Worlds’ Nintendo Switch port got delayed because of it.)
„The video game sector is currently manufacturing, or beginning to, a once-in-several-years’ product generation change for the 2020 holiday season. If [company] shutdowns exceed a month or so, game schedules will be delayed. New consoles may likewise suffer supply issues from a prolonged disruption, ahead of their Fall 2020 planned launches,” Jeffries Group, a financial service company, says on Business Insider.
A lot of hardware is being manufactured in China – the PlayStation 5’s SSD, which is rumoured to be Samsung’s 980 QVO NVMe SSD (we wrote about it earlier this week), is one of them. The next iPhone is also impacted: Foxconn, which manufactures the phones, is quarantining its employees. Jeffries Group says about „30-50% of art creation in Western games is done in China,” and nearly 100% of the hardware is being built there. Nintendo has already confirmed that the Nintendo Switch might be running out of stock due to shipment delays.
Also, we found a new patent for the PlayStation 5. It is called „In-game resource surfacing platform,” and in short, it is an artificial intelligence that provides players tips on how to proceed if they get stuck, or they get recommended to use microtransactions. One of the images show 2018’s God of War as an example, but they used Jörmungandr as a boss. (Which is stupid, as the serpent was on our side.) The AI would combine player data (both individual and collective) with natural language processing to provide those hints. Or if we are out of resources, we’d get pointed to the in-game microtransaction store if there is one.
The PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X will launch this Holiday season. We don’t know when exactly yet, and we might not know until much later.
Please support our page theGeek.games on Patreon, so we can continue to write you the latest gaming, movie and tech news and reviews as an independent magazine.
Become a Patron!
Leave a Reply