The PlayStation 4 dev team was "caught off guard" by the response to Sony's announcement that the console wouldn't support MP3 playback and DLNA media streaming, according to Shuhei Yoshida. He told Giant Bomb that while the features may not be available at launch, the team is looking at bringing them to PS4 later.
Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, said "the biggest surprise for us all internally at Sony" was how many people reacted passionately to the announcement.
"It's not like we actively decided 'Let's not do this feature so that people will subscribe to Music Unlimited,'" he said. "Like we've been saying, the focus has been always on the game features. And some of the features we wanted but we couldn't get in on day one — game features — we are very disappointed and worried about not having on day one and that have been the higher priorities."
Certain previously announced features, like the PS4's suspend/resume mode and the option to share a controller over the internet to assist a friend, won't be available at launch. Sony announced that in a lengthy
FAQ where the lack of MP3, CD and DLNA support was revealed.
"We didn't really think about MP3 or DLNA," Yoshida said. "We always thought we're going to do that eventually. We've been doing it with all the products. So it caught us off guard.
"People don't really talk about these features, right? But when we say we don't have it, some people get really mad [and say,] 'I canceled the pre-order!' Wait..." Yoshida said.
"As we speak ... the teams in Japan and U.S., the system guys are discussing how and when we can put these features on PS4."
Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2013 11:47 am
