Sony announced their answer to the Xbox Scorpio yesterday, which by the reactions afterwards pretty much fumbled Sony’s first answer to the move to 4K in gaming consoles. Microsoft announced that their entry level console will support 4K video, streaming and disks, in addition to being able to upscale all games running on the console to 4K via the revolutionary 4K upscaling.
Yesterday, Sony announced that their entry level console will not feature a 4K Blu-ray drive, or feature any 4K content support at the same price as the Xbox One S; and to make this, even more rage inducing, gave the Sony faithful a console that was wholly underpowered to even handle 4K gaming. However, this hasn’t stopped Sony and their partners being overly vague and, for the most part, misleading in terms of what the console can actually achieve.
Besides a few indie titles like Rocket League or some horrendous-looking MMOs like The Elder Scrolls Online and some random remastered games, you will not see native 4K games on the PlayStation 4 Pro because it’s not capable of displaying a game like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at native 4K. Only Xbox Scorpio will do it.
Developers behind Deus Ex and Watch Dogs 2 have already touted that their titles that launched this year (and will launch later) will feature 4K support right out of the box. Gamers, who rightfully wanted to know, asked if this was, in fact, native or just upscaling. Both these companies dodged the question faster than Don Mattrick did in 2013 regarding the Xbox One and its much-maligned feature set. Now we’re getting press releases that confirm that Deus Ex and Watch Dogs 2 won’t be native 4K on PlayStation 4 Pro.
More Smoke & Mirrors from Sony & Devs: Deus Ex:Mankind Divided will not be 4K native on PS4 Pro! #MoreLies Debunked pic.twitter.com/sM6YP5wtcK
— The♏️ooch (@Mooch1978) September 8, 2016
It’s quite funny since Sony was sued for this kind of behavior because of Killzone: Shadow Fall. They touted this title as 1080p 60 FPS—it was this huge deal in 2013—and ended up being an upscaled 720p game. It wouldn’t be far from reasonable to assume that Sony is literally setting themselves up for more litigation by blatantly lying about what their games will actually be capable of. Microsoft and Remedy got an extreme backlash after it was revealed that Quantum Break was rendering at 720p when they repeatedly stated that it was 1080p.
Sony is trying to pass off a massive failure as revolutionary, with deliberately vague language and obvious lies. Sony has shown their hand, and they blew it. Sony announced that they started working on the PlayStation 4 Pro right after the launch of the PlayStation 4, and one can clearly see that the device was mainly focussed on beating the original Xbox One even further, not any subsequent consoles revealed by Microsoft. Sony already failed the 4K revolution.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.