SCE studio boss confirms work is underway on 'future platform related activities'
One of the highest-ranking executives at Sony Computer Entertainment has revealed the company is hard at work on future platform developments.
But with former SCE president Ken Kutaragi now out of the picture, Sony is keen to turn to its first-party studios to help make future PlayStation consoles highly accessible for tomorrow’s game creators.
In an exclusive interview with Develop magazine, Sony Worldwide Studios (WWS) boss Shuhei Yoshida candidly explained how Sony has learnt from past mistakes and is now building tech that developers can get the most out of.
“When Ken Kutaragi moved on and Kaz Harai became the president of SCE, the first thing Kaz said was, ‘get World Wide Studios in on hardware development’,” Yoshida said.
“So he wanted developers in meetings at the very beginning of concepting new hardware, and he demanded SCE people talk to us [developers].”
And when asked whether this change in philosophy will be applied to future PlayStation hardware, Yoshida replied: “Yes, we are undergoing many activities that we haven’t yet been talking about in public. Some future platform related activities.”
Yoshida was appointed head of WWS at a time when Sony had endured a stuttering start to the PS3 era, as a number of third-party developers struggled to get enough out of the famously powerful console.
In the full Develop interview – published later this week – Yoshida explains in frank detail how SCE underwent a rescue mission for its first-party studios, bringing together top engineers from around the world to build a universal game engine.
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This studio-collaborative philosophy at Sony has remained in place ever since, and was a core pillar of the design ideology for Sony’s new motion controller, PlayStation Move.
“I’m spending more time on the hardware platform,” Yoshida added, “connecting hardware guys to developers. That’s my major role now, and Move is one of those new ways of developing platforms.”
So why would you be building another playstation platform system when people like us already own the original systems, the flat systems, and psp?
Because it's natural for a company to work on the next system post-launch?
Yeah SONY just shoots a new system out of their ass. I'm sure you'll be hearing rumors, hints and what not about PS4 up until launch.
Might even see it at E3 11 or at the end of 11'.
Dont be stupid now people. I can guarantee no information about PS4 will not be at E3 11 or even 12. Its years off yet.
It seems odd that Sony will even have say this now, maybe just to remind people its looking to the future.
You really think Microsoft and Nintendo aren't already deep into the R&D cycle of their next consoles? Of course they are
Well they supported the PsOne until the PS3 was launched, and they are still supporting the PS2, so I think we are okay if they are doing hardware research. The PS3 will last at least 10 years.
I hope that Sony stick with a Cell-like CPU and XDR-like RAM architecture next-gen.
First party devs are mastering it and many third party devs have mastered it or at least gotten the hang of it.
The whole make-up of the PS3 architecture is a massive step towards the future, the way it works and the concepts it works upon is ahead of its time.
Sony have had a hard time because of originally going down this route, but they've carved another identity for themselves, they are at the technological forefront, I hope that next-gen they don't give up on this progress they've made in shaping the industry at a core technical level.
Sticking with improved, next-gen versions of the current hardware will have massive benefits too...
Devs will only have to scale up dev kits and will require little extra learning, backwards compatibility with PS3 games and most PS1 games would work much better, manufacturing will be cheaper to start with and efficiency will be superior, it will also continue to move the industry forward in terms of shifting GPU tasks to a CPU, true parallel processing and more efficient ways of using RAM.
I hope they don't just move back to some general purpose CPU, cause on a technical level, all of this hard work would have been for nothing if they do that.
Since PS2 Sony obligated developers to learn from their concepts and never asked them what was best but it just worked fine. But for the HD era, production costs rose and to make things even worse developing for PS3 required highly talented and specialised engineers plus extra time in order to match 360 equivalents since the machine complexity increased dramatically due to new unconventional developing concepts. Sony just wanted to repeat the PS2 formula, except thinks became exponentially harder.
Many people like to compare Sega Saturn with the PS3. If you analize it both had a close competitor in terms of power, however the key difference is developing complexity just because engineers went crazy creating something that in theory was big, creative and very powerful but they just forgot about being practical; they never asked much developers about their opinion. They simply calculated and simulated everything with numbers but never experimented enough with real world conditions, they are lab scientists and engineers, period. That may explain why most of them don't have a real life hehe.
When PS2 was launched it was a hell for developers, when ps3 launched it was their worst nightmare. It was almost a pretty system but good for nothing, no one had a clue about how to make it work. Not even the biggest companies in the industry like EA.
Should we blame Sony? Oh yes, they believed they had a super powerful machine, even thought GPU was not necessary at all. That's why I think it took 1 more year to launch the PS3, they realized too late about the truth and had to develop a dedicated graphics chip.
In spite of the PS3 complexity, games in general have very good technical quality and easily compete with their 360 counterparts but they haven't necessarily surpassed them by a long shot yet and doubt they will.
So perhaps verifying hardware is just as powerful as engineers imagine it is, might be one of the best ideas Sony has had in the recent years; it's called common sense hahahah.
It's good to see Sony start to make wise business and marketing decisions. I am also very excited to see what product Sony is planning on developing. Hopefully, it's the long-awaited psp2. For more gaming news visit
http://vgamingblog.blogspot.com
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http://vgamingblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/playstation-wii-xbox-and-ipod-give-away.html
Interesting change of article title since yesterday...
The playstation 4's memory interface will be handled by rambus once again using the sucessor to their award winning xdr dram memory architecture the xdr 2 dram.Also nvidia will be working on playstation 4's gpu which will be a multi core gpu.ibm is working on playstation 4's cpu which based off the cell processor tech.
