Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, has blamed memory restrictions as the reason for why the PlayStation 3 lacks cross-game voice chat functionality.
"Once a game gets RAM we never give it back," Yoshida told Eurogamer. "It’s not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact."
In terms of RAM, Sony’s new handheld, PlayStation Vita, actually comes out on top compared to its big brother. Vita boasts 512MB of RAM and 128MB of V-RAM, while PS3 packs 256MB of system RAM and 256MB of video RAM under its hood.
As such, this allows various functions such as cross-game voice chat to run in the background while you’re playing a game. PS3, however, is another kettle of fish altogether.
"The game has to use its own memory to do [in-game voice chat]. There’s always voice chat in the game. But it’s a part of a game feature. It’s not a part of an OS feature. That’s the reason in terms of the ability to have voice chat across different games,” explained Yoshida.