Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida had a sort of AMA on PlayStation France's Twitter account, and he answered quite a few interesting questions.

Below, you can read a summary of what he mentioned:

  • On PSN Name changes, Yoshida-san would like to know when the feature will be ready himself. Sony is aware that people are asking for the feature and their engineers are looking into what they can do. There will be an announcement as soon as they'll know what will be done. As of today, they don't even know if it can be done, but hopefully it'll be doable.
  • Sony's engineers have been working to enable friend online notifications in the future.
  • Sony's first party and second party studios are developing over 30 games, maybe even 40 or 50 (at the end, though, he ended with "I have no idea" so the numbers are probably even more vague than they sound).
  • Yoshida-san gave a clear cut answer on the fact that PS4 won't have backwards compatibility with PS3 (literally, the answer was "no" on whether it's going to happen or not).
  • About the possibility of upgrading the specs of the PS4 even up to being able to support 4K, Yoshida-san explained that it was a purely hypotetical question, due to the fact that the PS4 is based on x86 architecture, making such an upgrade easier to implement(exactly as we mentioned when we wrote about it, unfortunately others seemed to have missed that detail).
  • RIME is still in development. It'll require a bit more patience because the developer is very small.
  • When asked about when the PS5 will be released, he mentioned that PS5 does not exist. Whether that means that it's currently not in development, we don't know.
  • According to what people tell him on Twitter, they liked PlayStation's Paris Games Week press conference.
  • Yoshida-san is excited to play Star Wars: Battlefront, No Man's Sky and The Witness.
  • There are no news to announce about PS1 and PS2 classics on PS4.
  • Sony's first party developers won't make any JRPG in the foreseeable future (again, the answer was a clear cut "no" to whether we can expect any or not).
  • Yoshida-san's favorite Street Fighter V character is Dhalsim, that he always used at the time of Street Fighter II.

So there you have it, straight from the lion's mouth: I have to admit that the "no" about the chance of getting a first party JRPG burns, but there are many great ones coming anyway.