Sony Aware of Everyone Hating Firmware Updates

If you’re like me, you have a limited time to play games, so the last thing you want to happen when you turn on your PS3 or PSP is watch the system update for 30 minutes. Well, good news! According to Game Informer’s interview with Shuhei Yoshida, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, Sony understands your pain, and hopes to make it at least a little better for the Vita.

“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,” Yoshida told Game Informer.

It’s good to see Sony recognizes the obvious, but what are they going to do about it?

While he didn’t give any specifics, Yoshida did seem to imply that the frequency of updates wouldn’t be reduced, but that the updates themselves would be less intrusive.

This could mean any number of things, from actually being able to play games during an update to the updates happening much faster. Or it could mean absolutely nothing, but I prefer to wildly speculate.

Yoshida also spoke of some of the lessons learned from the PSP, most notably that gamers don’t want a worse version of something they can play at home. Instead, the focus of the PS Vita is on technologies unique to handhelds, like touchscreens, GPS, and cameras.

Yoshida also promised Sony will “continue to support PS Vita with a stream of good titles through release.” If Sony can keep these promises, this might be generation of handhelds that breaks Nintendo’s stranglehold on the portable market – you know, the one that they’ve had for the past 20 years.

All I can say is it’s about freakin’ time.