Sony to support PS4 for 10-years, "always wanted to hit" $399 price point

Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida expects the lifespan of PS4 to last 10 years, just like its predecessors.

Speaking with CVG, Yoshida said with PS4, there is room for growth should games start to exceed the 8GB of RAM, and 10 years of support is planned.

"In the middle of PS3 we really hit the limit with what we could do on the system side," he said. "We wanted to add the cross-game voice chat that many people asked us about, but we had no room in the system memory at all to add it.

"So the PS4's enlarged, very fast memory allows us in the future to improve and add more new features. And at the same time we are continuing to invest and add onto the online services so that, three years from now, the PS4 will be much, much better than PS4 this holiday - and that was the case on PS3 and PS Vita."

Yoshida also touched upon the system's price point, stating Sony learned lessons from PS3, and did a better job this time out designing the system architecture, network services, and the lot.

"Designing PS4 was all about learning lessons from PS3 - ease of development and the cost of the system is a big part of it," he said. "We always wanted to hit $399 and we designed the system and carefully chose out of all the potential inclusions of the core hardware components and we made a system that we could sell for $399.

"So we just did what we aimed to do and we were hoping that people would like it. I was very surprised about the [price] announcement yesterday by some other company [Microsoft] ... In a good way".

PS4 is slated for a holiday release sometime close to Xbox One. The later of which will run $499 at retail.