SCE Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has confirmed that Sony will allow developers to disable the PlayStation 4′s Share button. “There will be parts of a game that the maker does not want people to be able to see,” the executive said in an interview with Japanese site 4Gamer translated by Edge. “For example, on Vita, developers can in certain scenes disable the feature that lets users take a screenshot, and (the Share function) will have a similar mechanism. The creator may not want to make video of the final boss sharable, for instance.” The Share button is deigned to allow users to quickly and easily capture and upload video. Yoshida said the moment the idea was touted, everyone on the PS4 in-house production team knew it was right. Himself a passionate gamer, Yoshida firmly believes the Share button will be important to the PlayStation 4 user base. “I wanted to play Dark Souls all day long, but I couldn’t do that because I was too busy. So instead I would watch people playing it live on Niconico whenever I had some spare time,” he said, referring to Japan’s most popular video sharing service. “By doing that, you can find other ways to play the game and read comments by other users. I felt that sharing videos is a really important part of enjoying games.” Elsewhere in the interview, Yoshida reiterated Sony’s messaging that the PS4′s user-friendliness is one of its most important features – that it can switch on and off instantly, won’t make you wait around, and will switch easily between apps. Along with ease of development, this kind of attention to user experience will hopefully make the PS4 the best system for multi-platform releases, he said. “We need to make sure users consider the PS4 version to be the best and the one they want to play. That might mean that the graphics are better, the controller is more comfortable, or the point I mentioned earlier about the console being more user-friendly, like you don’t have to turn the power on and off or you can switch between your game and Netflix at will. Those things will become key,” he said. The PlayStation 4 is due during the 2013 holiday period; we’re expecting pricing and date details to be announced at E3 in June. Source VG247.
