Ever since the Xbox 360 introduced cross-game chat to its Xbox Live users, enabling them to party up with and chat with players in other games, PlayStation 3 fans have wondered when Sony would implement such a feature on the PSN. As it turns out, the reason we’ve been waiting so long for this feature, is because the PS3 simply cannot do it. There are memory restrictions in place that would make it impossible, Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer.
A RAM usage feature of the console prevents a cross-game chat feature, Yoshida explained.
“Once a game gets RAM we never give it back,” he said. “It’s not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact…The game has to use its own memory to do in-game voice chat. There’s always voice chat in the game. But it’s part of a game feature. It’s not part of an OS feature. That’s the reason in terms of the ability to have voice chat across different games.”