Sony has tagged the PlayStation 4 with a lifespan of ten years, in line with that of its predecessors.
Speaking to CVG, Sony Worldwide Studios chief Shuhei Yoshida said that there is much room for growth should games start to exceed the hardware constraints on the PS4.
“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.”
In other words, the system specifications and the 8gb of memory built into the system affords Sony and its developers a lot of bandwidth that the previous system could ill attempt to provide.
“Designing PS4 was all about learning lessons from PS3 – ease of development and the cost of the system is a big part of it,” he said. “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”.
Expect Sony to do a lot with it. The console is set for release this coming Holiday season and will carry a price tag of $399.
