"In an exclusive interview with Develop Magazine, one of the highest-ranking executives at Sony Computer Entertainment has revealed the company is “hard at work” on next-generation PlayStation hardware platforms. Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios told the magazine how the company wants to shift its platform design strategy to incorporate software developers into the central role of deciding hardware choices for its upcoming platforms.

“When Ken Kutaragi moved on and Kaz Harai became the president of SCE, the first thing Kaz said was, ‘get World Wide Studios in on hardware development,” Yoshida said. With former president Ken Kutaragi out of the picture, Sony is announcing its focus on gathering the opinions of first-party studios to help make future PlayStation consoles highly accessible their development teams.

Yoshida went on to elaborate the specifics of the company’s change in platform design philosophy and its anticipated effects in the near future. “We are undergoing many activities that we haven’t yet been talking about in public. Some future platform related activities.” Many analysts believe Yoshida may be referring to Sony’s next-generation portable console, the PSP 2. The original PSP, introduced in December 2004 in Japan and March 2005 in North America, has sold over 58.8 million units since launch and continues to climb in both markets with the latest PSP Go hardware refresh. Keep in mind, however, that the PSP Go is merely a refresh of the original PSP platform and does not represent a second-generation portable platform."