Sony is Still Working on Features Announced During PS4’s Debut

During the initial unveiling of the Playstation 4 in 2013 Sony announced a slew of features that the new console was supposed to have. Most of those features arrived at launch, or have future release dates already announced, such as Playstation Now. However there are a couple of them that haven’t been brought up at all since that day. The two features at issue are the ability to put your PS4 to sleep and immediately resume playing a game after, and allowing friends to take over control of a game via the internet.

At E3 Sony’s head of worldwide studios Shuhei Yoshida was asked why these features are still unavailable and if there were any plans for them to be released later. When asked about friends being able to take control of your PS4 game he responded, “[o]ur team has been working on it. There are some things that we announced in February of last year that were not planned for the launch timeframe.” And when asked about the PS4 game suspension feature he similarly replied “[i]t’s not ready yet,” Yoshida tells Kotaku.

As far as when these features might be available on the PS4 Yoshida said “I am asking the same question to my tech team every other week. Because every day I get reminded by lots of people: ‘Where is this? Where is that?’ It’s a great reminder for me.” 

Many consoles in the past have announced features which were later quietly scrapped. For example, the PS3 was originally supposed to feature two HDMI outputs allowing for two HDTVs to split one game. Similarly, the bottom of every Nintendo console has had multiple connectors that later went unused. It wouldn’t be too surprising for Sony to just ignore these features until everyone stops asking about them, but Yoshida’s words do hold promise.