PS4 Lead Architect: Sony 'Clearly Had Some Issues With PS3'

The lead architect behind the PlayStation 4 has said that Sony's desire to change its approach to hardware development stemmed from the "issues" developers had in getting to grips with the PS3.

Mark Cerny, who was brought in to design the PS4 design back in 2007, told Gamasutra that any problems developers might have had with current-generation hardware should be largely remedied come next-gen.

"Wanting to lead the effort [on building PS4] wasn't based on any specific beliefs at that time, other than that clearly we had had some issues with PlayStation 3," he said.

"A very developer-centric approach to the design of the PlayStation 4 would just make things go more smoothly overall... The biggest thing was that we didn't want the hardware to be a puzzle that programmers would be needing to solve to make quality titles."

Cerny added that he toured a number of studios back in 2008 and asked them what they wanted to see in a next-generation console. "The largest piece of feedback we got was that they wanted unified memory," he noted, which explains Sony's reveal of 8GB GDDR5 RAM in the PlayStation 4, accessible by both the CPU and GPU.

PS4 is slated for a launch in "Holiday 2013," but no firm date has been announced for any territory.