Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Worldwide Studios and the 26th Hottest Man in Games, has been very busy lately, what with the PlayStation 4 launch happening in about 6 months.
Speaking to Edge, he went into a little detail about the history of the PlayStation 4 development, saying that “as soon as [the PS3] launched I’m sure some parts of the company, especially those hardware people who work in R&D and the semi-conductor [area] must have started the R&D effort [on the PS4].” It wasn’t until 2008 though when “the initial project was formed, not by just the R&D people but including different parts of the larger, more cross-sectional team.”
Shuhei also went on to note that Kaz (KAZ!) “decided the process had to change” once the PlayStation 3’s development had been complete, trusting “the hardware team here to start involving the software team of Worldwide Studios.” That was around the same time they started on the PS Vita, which “was a shorter project compared to PS4,” and they “worked on both projects simultaneously.”
When the topic of Nintendo and them focusing on the user experience came up, Shuhei said that “it’s not easy to make a system that ‘just works’. We’ve been criticized all the time for people having to wait to download patches, or for firmware updates, and we are gamers as well so we know exactly what people have to go through on PS3. So we wanted to really make it a focus so that our developers in Tokyo and the US who work on system software and such features were really thinking about some of these experiences.”
To wrap it up, Shuhei said that “the biggest focus” for them at the console unveiling was “to show how the game experiences will change with PS4,” and once they’ve achieved that, “then probably later this year we’ll talk more about what these non-game functions [are] that we are trying to bring to PS4 as well.”
Do you think Shuhei should’ve placed higher in the Hottest Men in Games? Do you agree with his favorite choice? Let us know in the comments below.
