Cross-Game Chat For PS3 “Not Possible”

In a recent interview, president of Sony Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida has stated that cross-game chat will never make its way to the PlayStation 3. According to Yoshida the console’s RAM is consumed almost entirely by running software, without a sufficient remainder to power cross-game sessions, an online function PS3 owners have been asking for since the emergence of Xbox Live Party.

Once a game gets RAM we never give it back, it’s not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact… The game has to use its own memory to do [in-game voice chat]. There’s always voice chat in the game. But it’s a part of a game feature. It’s not a part of an OS feature. That’s the reason in terms of the ability to have voice chat across different games.

PlayStation Vita on the other hand will support cross-game chat, carrying a hefty RAM of 516MB, doubling that of its home console counterpart.

Source: Eurogamer

84 Comments

  1. Forgive my technical ignorance (and feel free to correct me) but…

    Is there no way of allocating a portion of the hdd to act as some sort of virtual RAM? Failing that how about a USB plug-in RAM extension solely dedicated to cross game chat. Didn’t the N64 have a similar thing for some games?

  2. This sucks!

  3. PS3’s lack of RAM has always been its downfall. If it had the same amount of RAM as the PlayStation Vita, then it would have at least provided much better loading times for the XMB and cross-game voice chat.

  4. …and they couldn’t have just told us that years ago?

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