Sony plans unobtrusive Vita updates

Sony hopes to make the PlayStation Vita's firmware updates less intrusive than on the PlayStation 3 and PSP, according to worldwide studios chief Shuhei Yoshida.

Yoshida wouldn't offer GameInformer any firm details of how things will work on the new handheld, but confirmed it was working on a solution.

"I agree, it's very annoying when you only have one hour in your busy life to play a game, and when you have to spend 30 minutes out of that one hour to update the hardware," he said.

"So it's not necessarily the frequency of how we update, it's like you said - intrusiveness - of the current processes that we have on PS3 and PSP. I cannot talk about specific plans, but we are very aware of the issues, and we'd like to address those issues on PS Vita going forward."

He also divulged a few more details of the portable's Remote Play features, as discussed during his TGS keynote address last week.

He confirmed that not all PlayStation 3 games will be streamable onto the Vita straight off the bat - developers will have to deliberately incorporate the functionality.

"Yesterday, the demo that I showed using Killzone 3 was customised," he explained.

"It was meant as a technical demo and we haven't even finished the utility of the Remote Play that's really, really nice to support higher resolution screens on PS Vita, and the mapping of controls like R3, R2, L2 buttons using the backtouch panel.

"So as soon as we complete the development of those utilities, we will release the utility to PS3 developers so that they can check if their games work with the utility or they may have to do some additional work, because the Remote Play takes some additional memory and CPU time out of PS3 games. So some games that really utilise the PS3 capabilities may not work, so we'll see."