Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, has confirmed that the console maker never considered going down the online-only path for PlayStation 4.
“Did we consider it? No, we didn’t consider it,” Yoshida-san told Game Informer.
Sony’s reasoning behind the decision isn’t actually all that surprising, either. As Yoshida-san points out, many countries around the world lack a substantial Internet connection to support such a feature.
“The main reason being that many countries don’t have robust internet connections. It makes sense for people to have internet connections to play online games, but for offline games there are many countries that we saw do not really have robust internet,” he said.
The subject of an online-only console has come into light recently in regards to the direction Microsoft aims to take its new Xbox console. Several sources claimed it would be online-only, though as of late this seems not to be the case after all.
Back when PS4 was first announced, one of the first things Sony made clear was that PS4 would not require a constant Internet connection to play single-player games.