It's a generational decline, not a console decline, Sony Worldwide Studios president says

The length of the current console generation stifled innovation and Sony's next-gen console is designed to invigorate developers over its lifespan, Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida told GamesIndustry International.

When asked about the innovations that have come from mobile, smartphone and PC gaming in recent years, Yoshida said that the console market was stymied by hardware but is primed to reinvigorate developers.

"It's not the decline of consoles, it's the decline of a generation," he said. "This generation has been the longest on the PS3 and the Xbox, it's the seventh year. In older times we would have launched a new system already. Really, developers hit the limits after a couple of games on the same system, typically.

"There are a few developers like Naughty Dog or Quantic Dream who are doing more, but that's kind of the exception. After you see the sequels to the same three games people feel like they've seen everything before. That's natural, but that's nothing like the end of the consoles."

Though Sony expects the PS4 to have a long lifespan like the PS3, he said that Sony designed the console so it wouldn't show its limitations as quickly as its predecessor did.

"The key to this on PS4 is we have a huge 8 GB of memory," he said. "That's way more than game developers need initially. At the mid-point of the PlayStation 3 lifecycle we really hit the limit of what we can add in terms of system features. The reason we couldn't add cross-game voice chat that players wanted was we were out of memory. Because we have 8GB of RAM we can secure enough room for whatever great features developers can come up with."