PS4's 'Share' button will have limitations

Shuhei Yoshida, Sony Worldwide Studios president, spoke with Edge.com about the implementable limitations of the PlayStation 4 controller's Share button.

The introduction of the Share button on the PS4 controller instilled in gamers the excitement of potentially sharing epic fights and kill streaks with friends at any time, but Yoshida indicates that developers have control over what gamers can share. Yoshida had this to say in regards to the Share button:

"There will be parts of a game that the maker does not want people to be able to see. For example, on Vita, developers can in certain scenes disable the feature that lets users take a screenshot, and (the Share function) will have a similar mechanism. The creator may not want to make video of the final boss sharable, for instance.”

It goes without saying that developers would rather have their content purchased and played rather than streamed from a Youtube account of some random fan, so the necessity for limitations makes perfect sense for Sony to implement. Better still, each developer will have full control over this function, so the team doesn't need to work around any built-in roadblocks that could have been built into the PS4 software. 

Specific details on this aspect of the Share button were not disclosed, but the control that developers will have with the PS4 is admirable. These control schemes may allow developers to control pre-released content much easier, at least in terms of the content within the games themselves. For instance, early review copies could have limits on what journalists can record and use in their reviews, and then developers could lift those limitations once the game's release date arrives. Until further information is disclosed, this concept is pure speculation.

An exact release date has yet to be announced for the PlayStation 4, but it's expected to release this holiday season. We may not know for sure exactly how developers plan to utilize the Share button, but the fact that the console releases this year may alleviate any sort of potential gamer limitations altogether.

Source: Gamingbolt