Sony has placed a copyright claim on a leaks video about the PlayStation 5 Pro.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead’s video about the PlayStation 5 Pro from March has been taken down from the site. A message on the url says that “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Sony Interactive Entertainment.”
While we reported Insider Gaming’s follow up rumors regarding the PlayStation 5 Pro, it seems the smoking gun was that Moore’s Law is Dead YouTube video from just the day before. For the sake of documentation, this was what was revealed in that video, as Insider Gaming themselves reported it:
- Rendering 45% faster than PS5
- 2-3x Ray-tracing (x4 in some cases)
- 33.5 Teraflops
- PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling) upscaling/antialiasing solution
- Support for resolutions up to 8K is planned for future SDK version
- Custom machine learning architecture
- AI Accelerator, supporting 300 TOPS of 8 bit computation / 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point
Insider Gaming and IGN both corroborated that the information in the YouTube video came from documentation on a PlayStation developer portal. In other words, that information was verified to be legitimate, and Sony’s plans got leaked out months early.
Within a few days of this leak, Sony was reportedly already investigating this leak, and presumably they would have traced the developer or insider who compromised their security and trust. They will likely never make that information public, but that couldn’t stop them from doing this.
Now, Sony surely must have known that taking this video down would be tantamount to admitting that the rumor was true. We don’t think the company currently worrying about declining first party sales would make the effort to strike one YouTube down for that purpose.
It’s more likely this move was meant to punish YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead. The copyright strike system in YouTube is slanted against the YouTubers, as this system can lead to demonetization and even account closure. There’s also opportunity for abuse as many YouTubers have proven they were the victim of false strikes.
But if we assume that the takedown was valid, that would mean that Moore’s Law is Dead really did get their hands on documents from Sony detailing the PlayStation 5 Pro. This potentially opens the floodgates, as other game journos, influencers, or insiders can share information about the console, knowing that they are more likely to be believed.
Sony probably wanted to have control over how they would announce the PlayStation 5 Pro. While some insiders claim the industry waits on this console, and Grand Theft Auto 6, to hopefully revitalize the video game industry, there’s some early mumblings that gamers aren’t eager to buy this platform.
Perhaps we can still expect a large number of gamers to get onboard Grand Theft Auto 6, but they may not necessarily buy a PlayStation 5 Pro for it. And what if Grand Theft Auto 6 doesn’t release in a timely manner after all? We think the industry isn’t actually reliant on this one game and one console to be successful, but it sounds like a lot of money men in gaming are setting themselves up based on rumors.
In any case, Sony may now feel pressured to at least confirm the console now. We are definitely waiting to see what Sony does – and how gamers will react.
