During the conference on Wednesday, Andrew House [Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment] talked about how the PS4 was designed in conjunction with developers. This reminded me of PlayStation 1 and how Sony went around the world visiting studios and gathering opinions. Were you consciously returning to that way of doing things?

It's interesting you ask that – and yes, when you look at it that way, we did a similar thing to when we made PS1. We kind of stopped doing that in later years, but this time, we made a conscious decision. Kaz Hirai instructed our development studio to be part of the hardware and platform group for PS4 and PS Vita in 2008. And also SCEI brought in Mark Cerny – who has been our longest partner, all the way back to the Crash Bandicoot days – as the system architect for PS4. He has had some part in the PS Vita development as well.

The initial brief from Kaz was, take the ideas and desire from game developers both internally and externally to create the new hardware. Yes, in retrospect, that is similar to our approach with PlayStation 1.

What were the fundamental things that developers were asking for? From chatting to a few studios it seems social connectivity was a key element, but then the PC-like architecture has also been mentioned… Were these the two most common requests?

Yes, I can say that. Development on PS3 was very hard because of the unique architecture, so we made the decision use a more popular architectures so developers would be able to use the same tools and engines, and make a seamless move to PS4 – that was a big focus. They also wanted a larger amount of system memory as well!

Connectivity was a big area, both between players and between devices. Developers are very far ahead in thinking how they can use different platforms and social network services with console games – we thought yes, that's what we want to do as well. These things can be done on the game side, but as with any other network features, gamers don't want to have to set-up lots of different accounts when they play different games. We wanted to provide these features from the system side so that people only have to download the application once, allowing them to connect their iOS and Android handsets to PS4. It's an additional option for developers to create their own dedicated applications on these devices, but I expect more developers will choose to use our app as it's so easy.