Shuhei Yoshida Responds To Todays PS4 News

It was announced earlier today (technically yesterday for me) that the PS4 wont play mp3's', wont support DLNA, external hard drives, and that the vitas remote play functionality wont work so hot when on a different network than the one the console is hooked up to.

Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony's Worldwide Studios for SCE responds to some of these issues on twitter

Crisis averted

Listen to porn? I don't think that guy knows how to porn correctly.

@andorski said:

He needs his guns to moan and scream.

Shu is so damn hilarious, haha.

He's fun on twitter, sometimes throws up a lot of ads which usually I then stop following people, but he has moments like this so I keep him around in my twitter feed.

And here's his serious answer to the real question:

http://kotaku.com/the-ps4-takes-a-step-backwards-1455495418

Enough people have complained throughout the day that PlayStation boss Shuehei Yoshida has been alerted, telling fans on Twitter "Thanks for the feedback to the lack of MP3 and DLNA support at the launch of PS4. I'll share with the PS4 Dev team for future consideration."

Could be a "Thanks for your feedback, now get lost", could be a "Oh shit, we'd better put this in an early firmware update". Let's hope it's the latter.

Well said, Kotaku. Well said.

It sounds like they know they are the "Gamers Choice" right now and don't want to blow that.

Now if it just had any games I actually wanted to play...

Haha what a champ

I just find it kind of nuts that the console manufacturer with the music and movie arms is the one not supporting this shit up front. I wonder what the reasoning was? Surely it must have been considered?

I can't imagine Shu would make a public comment like this if the decision to not include DLNA at launch was an intentional business decision; he'd be privy to that information you'd think.

@rick_fingers: Licensing costs, I imagine. Still gotta pay someone to license mp3 decoding. Well, if you do it legit, which a company releasing a product has to.

It's likely exactly because of their music and movie arms that they are doing this. They want people to buy and enjoy their selection of music and movies, not just any music and movies.

Hopefully they will see that such a push is not worth it and instead provide this functionality once again.

@truthtellah: fair point.

I guess when you combine the PS3 with Sony's new "pro-consumer" attitude (he said, snickering to himself) that this kind of shocked me

Yeah, it's still good to remember that this is Sony, and big companies take a long time to truly go in a new direction. And sometimes, they'll "try something new" and then stick to their guns in everything else. Hopefully they're interested enough in really embracing this new direction that they'll reconsider this. They certainly have the technology to do it; I mean, it's their system. ha.

MP3 licensing is relatively expensive, too...especially if you consider that Sony will be selling millions upon millions of PS4's, and probably at a loss on the hardware at least for awhile. Even if they were able to license the decoder and codec for $1 per unit each (and I think it's higher than that still) that's a lot of cash. It probably came down to either a) no MP3's, or b) losing an additional $100 million on hardware over the next few years if they licensed it.

@mb: And probably assumed not enough people used the feature to be worth it. Like Microsoft moving DVD playback on the first Xbox to a separate add-on.

If this is the case, wonder if we'll eventually see an "optional media update" sold on PSN for a few bucks

Oh my PS4 can't play music anymore that is so sad. yes mp3 licensing is very expensive because copyright is paid for that and to the singers. :(

Is this the first device released since the 90s that can't play audio CDs/MP3s? That part is just weird.

The loss of media streaming is very significant for a lot of people. It's not like they are releasing this thing with tons of games worth playing.

Yeah mp3s don't bother me. I do want to be able to either stream or connect a drive to my media center console to watch video files, though.

OUYA does what Sondoesn't.

I haven't used the music streaming feature on my 360 in years I just put headphones on while I game now. And the video streaming abilities of both consoles I haven't used since I decided to stop pirating movies and actually you know pay for them on services like Amazon. The music capabilities would be nice as an option to get at some point but the video playback I don't have a need for anymore as I can drop $5 to rent a movie.

" Xbox, snap Big Wet Butts 5 and keep playing Assassin's Creed."

You know, dumb stuff like that response is why I love Sony.

There are plenty entirely legal circumstances when you want to stream video files from your PC to a console. It's a feature I'll miss. I don't stream music on to it as much, but sometimes if I'm going to play a racing game I might want to listen to some music. Probably just use my iPod though, at least that scrobbles to Last.fm

@forkboy: Yeah of course there is but its a feature I'll never use so thats why its no big loss to me. But more options is never a bad thing so I understand the disappointment. The music though would be nice and at the very least it would be a great coup if Sony could look past it's own investment in the pointless Music Unlimited and partner with a service like Pandora or Spotify and allow that to play in the background. That I would use more than streaming my own content off my PC. Those services have pretty much replaced my iTunes library on my phone entirely.

They have a premium service for those things they'd prefer you'd subscribe to instead? For music anyway. That might be it, or it might be something else. Either way, in the end, this was a bad idea.

This.

That is amazing. super win

Twitter seems to provide us with some comedic gold from time to time.