PlayStation 4 architect on welcoming developers

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Wanted to make sure PS4 wasn't a "puzzle" like PS3

PlayStation 4 lead system architect Mark Cerny was thinking about the console in late 2007--just a year after PlayStation 3 was released. He wasn't the architect at the time, Cerny told Gamasutra, but Sony saw promise in his ideas: one of which was "that a very developer-centric approach to the design of the PlayStation 4 would just make things go more smoothly overall."

The PlayStation 3's Cell processor was billed as a unique powerhouse, but its idiosyncratic architecture made it a difficult beast to tame. On Cerny's first tour of developers, it became clear they wanted two things: a lot of unified memory, and an 8-core CPU.

PS4 has both, and Cerny said Sony's experience building the Vita into a friendlier development environment laid the groundwork for its new home console.

"We took Vita as an opportunity to rework the tool chain and the development environment, and I think that you saw that the response from the development community [to those changes] was very good," says Cerny. "That meant that with PS4 we already had this philosophy in place--that we wanted our tools to be much richer and much more accessible to our developers, even in the launch timeframe."

Speaking of PS4's launch timeframe, check out our list of all the game's confirmed for the system so far.

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Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan
Former GamesRadar+ News Writer

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar+.