Shuhei Yoshida Talks PS4 UI and Social Features

Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida has come up on the official Playstation blog to share more details about the Playstation 4’s user interface and social features via interview.

I’m not sure why Shuhei could not just write this one himself, but Playstation Blog rounds up each point one at a time. His demonstration focused on the system’s new social aspect, but it remains a work in progress. As demonstrated, you will immediately see info on your games, your friends and their activity, upcoming DLC, and even jump into someone playing their console live.

In his demonstration, he watched someone playing Killzone, joined in, too screenshots and shared them to Facebook, the latter action almost instantly. At any time, a player would also be able to upload the last fifteen minutes they played to Facebook or other social networks.

Yoshida says that he has already maxed out friend requests on all his social media accounts. The Playstation 4 will allow you to add 2,000 people. I personally think a majority of these will end up being complete strangers who will just want to watch you play.

Yoshida hopes users will find discoverability straight from the UI to be its best feature. As mentioned above, so much information will be available when the console is on, even if you’re not playing any particular game.

Finally, Yoshida is most excited about indies coming on board to the system. He likens it to the situation in the original Playstation, and of course history shows how these words ring true. Both the video gaming audience and the base of game developers grew far more than at any point before. The Playstation 1 era really was a wellspring of creativity and new ideas.

Whether his hopes that the Playstation 4 can replicate that environment is another matter entirely, but it is great to know that under Yoshida, we can expect Sony to continue to be widely supportive of developers. You can check out his Gamescom demonstration below.

Source: Playstation Blog