Sony Never Even Considered Cutting The PlayStation Vita's RAM, According To Shuhei Yoshida.

The speculation at the time suggested that the system's capabilities had been slashed in order to meet a mass-market price.

Of course, those rumours weren't true, and Sony has said that it laughed off such claims when they emerged. Speaking to Eurogamer, Worldwide Studios gaffer Shuhei Yoshida said that the Vita's 512MB of RAM is necessary in order for the device to play games and run external applications.

"Part of the reason [for including 512MB of RAM] is more RAM means easier development for game developers," Shuhei said.

"But as important as that is to allow the PS Vita always to do more while the game is running in the background, or when you switch between the game and other applications or system software functionalities.

"So the reason why we were able to include something like Party, which enables cross-game voice chat, is because we designed Vita so it always has enough resources to handle something like that behind the game while it's running."

Contrary to rumours, Shuhei said that Sony never even considered cutting the Vita's on-board RAM.

"It has been very funny," he joked. "There were some rumours for the last few months. Some developer mentioned the RAM was halved. We never announced the amount of RAM, and we never changed it.

"We've been making games, right, and we've been showing the games, like Uncharted, since January. If RAM gets cut in the middle of development, there's no way we can complete the games. So I was like, what's going on?

"I got lots of Tweets saying, Sony made a huge mistake by reducing the amount of RAM. We never talked about the amount of RAM and we never cut it.

"So going into GamesCom we agreed there was no reason we should hide it, so we just added it to the specifications. We always had 512MB of main RAM and 128MB of V-RAM. Actually when you add them together, PS Vita has more RAM than PS3 [the PS3 has 256MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256MB of GDDR3 video memory]."

As such, Yoshida said there is no reason for fans to worry about the PlayStation Vita's power.

"So far we've been getting very positive reactions from our developer and publisher partners. We could put even more power into the portable, but there has to be a balance made between the size of the unit, the weight and the amount of time you can play. We think we've hit the right balance in terms of creating a great experience on the PS Vita.

"The PS3 provides a full HD experience. The resolution on the PS Vita screen is much lower. Even though it's four times the resolution of PSP, compared to the console, the amount of data you have to push is much smaller. So that works to the advantage of the PS Vita."

Anyone else falling in love with Mr. Yoshida?

[Thanks Eurogamer]