DualShock 4 2

You may know first-party powerhouse Sony Santa Monica best for creating the God of War games, but Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has revealed that the developer also played a pivotal role in one of the PlayStation 4’s most important features: the Share button.

Chatting candidly with EDGE magazine, the affable executive explained that after deciding upon the next generation console’s core internals, the company turned its attention to the user experience, which is when the idea of the dedicated social input started to formulate.

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“We formed the cross-functional groups of people from SCEI hardware group and Worldwide Studios and Sony network services teams to meet every month,” he said. “And the idea of sharing and seamless integration with social networks, that was heavily discussed.”

Yoshida continued: “I think it was [creative director] Nathan Gary in Santa Monica studios who suggested it: how about adding a dedicated button on the controller so that everybody can just press that button to share?”

Gary – who was at the time involved with external projects such as Journey and The Unfinished Swan – prepared a PowerPoint presentation on the concept, and higher-ups at Sony instantly fell in love with the idea.

“It was a pretty quick decision after he suggested it, and I’m sure that he’s pretty proud of his contribution,” Yoshida added. “That was after many months of discussion of how people should be using the PS4 system, and sharing was one of the central experiences that we wanted to include in the system’s development.”

In short, the Share button will allow you to record and edit gameplay footage, which you'll then be able to upload to social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook. This will apparently operate without any penalty to the system's performance, as the console has been constructed with the functionality in mind.

[source edge-online.com]