Earlier this week, Sony announced that it would offer a "deep dive" into the "system architecture" of its upcoming PlayStation 5 console in a live-streamed event scheduled for Wednesday.
There has been nothing but radio silence from Sony regarding the next-gen system, except for a logo and a website that hasn't been updated with new information since it went live in January.
PS5 event fails to impress fans
So, when the company announced a digital event hosted by lead system architect Mark Cerny, hundreds of thousands of fans (700,000 to be precise) tuned in to watch and expectations were running high. Fans were hoping to finally see the console's design, hardware, controllers, maybe even some games at the event. However, what they received instead, was a boring, technical lecture that failed to appease the gaming community.
Cerny took his time to talk about things GPU cache scrubbers and Geometry engines that would've made sense to a developer making software for the PlayStation 5, but came across as a bunch of gibberish to the average gamer. If the YouTube chat was any indication, the presentation was nothing more than a snooze fest.
This doesn't come as a surprise given that this presentation was supposed to take place in front of a developer-facing audience at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year, which was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.
PS5 vs Xbox Series X
Although Sony did reveal some important hardware specs about the upcoming system during the live stream, fans were further disappointed when they found out that the PS5 console will not be fully backwards compatible.
Cerny revealed that only the top 100 PS4 games will be backwards compatible at launch with more to follow later but will not be compatible with previous-generation consoles like the Xbox Series X. The PS5's 10.28 teraflops of graphics power is also lower than the 12 teraflops Microsoft is offering on its upcoming system.
Fan reactions on social media
Fans didn't waste any time in criticizing Sony and expressing their anger over the lacklustre presentation on social media. These reactions vary from simple criticism to memes revolving around the tech-centric presentation to people expressing disappointment at the console's limited backwards compatibility feature among other things. Here are some of the top posts:
