PlayStation 4 is expected to endure a healthy shelf life of 10 years, the president of SCE Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida has said.
Speaking with CVG, Yoshida-san also admitted that it wanted to include the much-requested cross-game voice chat in PS3, but due to technical limitations couldn’t do so. This sort of thing won’ be an issue with PS4 however, as thanks to its meaty memory the system can be upgraded if necessary.
“In the middle of PS3 we really hit the limit with what we could do on the system side,” he said. “We wanted to add the cross-game voice chat that many people asked us about, but we had no room in the system memory at all to add it.
“So the PS4′s enlarged, very fast memory allows us in the future to improve and add more new features. And at the same time we are continuing to invest and add onto the online services so that, three years from now, the PS4 will be much, much better than PS4 this holiday – and that was the case on PS3 and PS Vita.”
Elsewhere, the executive said that the hardware giant learned from its experience with PS3 in order to create a machine that allowed them to hit that $399 sweet spot – something which went down a storm at Sony’s E3 presser on Tuesday.
“Designing PS4 was all about learning lessons from PS3 – ease of development and the cost of the system is a big part of it,” said Yoshida-san. “We always wanted to hit $399 and we designed the system and carefully chose out of all the potential inclusions of the core hardware components and we made a system that we could sell for $399.
“So we just did what we aimed to do and we were hoping that people would like it. I was very surprised about the [price] announcement yesterday by some other company [Microsoft] … In a good way”.
PS4 is scheduled to ship in holiday 2013 alongside games such as Killzone: Shadow Fall, DriveClub and Knack.
