What Vita means for Sony
The men taking charge of the Japanese giant’s next console discuss its creation – and future.
The men taking charge of the Japanese giant’s next console discuss its creation – and future.
At E3 in June, Sony Worldwide Studios Europe vice-president Michael Denny said that the company's upcoming PSP successor would be region free "to the best of my knowledge." Now Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has taken to Twitter to confirm that the handheld will not be region-locked - just as well given that we're still without western release dates for the handheld, which will be on Japanese shelves on December 17.
2Speaking to Game Informer at last week's Tokyo Game Show, Sony Worldwide Studios' Shuhei Yoshida said the company realised the time taken to update PS3 firmware was excessive. "It's very annoying when you only have one hour in your busy life to play a game, and when you have to spend 30 minutes out of that one hour to update the hardware," he said. "So it's not necessarily the frequency of how we update, it's the intrusiveness of the current process we have on PS3 and PSP. I cannot talk about specific plans, but we are very aware of the issues, and we'd like to address those issues on PS Vita."
Speaking to IGN at the Tokyo Game Show, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said the company would release an external battery pack to help offset Vita's battery life of just three to five hours. "One of the peripherals is the external battery," he said. "That will extend the battery life of PS Vita...so if you're flying from New York to San Francisco, or vice versa, you have no concern because you have an additional, external battery."
7Graham McAllister maps out the opportunities and pitfalls that lie ahead if games were to know how you feel.
Speaking during a roundtable session at Gamescom last week, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said the company would give developers greater access to user metrics. "We like to provide our developers with much more services for the platform," he said. "Platform holders have data, and that data has not necessarily been available for developers. Sometimes it's just hard to provide the right data to development teams. But [we are offering] more and more services to developers, and I think things will just get better and better."
Speaking to Eurogamer, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said that the continiung absence of cross-game chat on PS3 was due to memory limitations. "Once a game gets RAM we never give it back," he said. "It's not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact. The game has to use its own memory to do [in-game chat]. There's always voice chat in the game. But it's part of a game feature, not part of an OS feature. That's the reason in terms of the ability to have voice chat across different games."
2Speaking to Eurogamer at this week's Gamescom in Cologne, Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida said that recent reports that Sony had halved the RAM in its upcoming portable to keep costs down were "very funny." Those reports appeared to be corroborated by Reality Fighters developer Novarama, but Yoshida says a RAM cut was never on the agenda. "It's been very funny. Some developer mentioned the RAM was halved," he said. "We never announced the amount of RAM, and we never changed it. We've been making games, right, and we've been showing the games since January. If RAM gets cut in the middle of development, there's no way we can complete the games. So I was like, what's going on?" Sony's PSP successor has 512MB of RAM and 128MB of VRAM, meaning it has more memory than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
“Without doing so, the whole industry will stall, in terms of innovation,” says the head of SCE Worldwide Studios.
1President of Sony worldwide studios says iPad proves market exists for high-end portables that don't make calls.
8The Sony boss on learning from PSP and taking on the iPad.
But SCE president says NGP "isn't just a platform for porting PS3 titles".