14 DAY TRIAL // Sony was surprised about the feedback it received after confirming that the PS4 wouldn't support MP3 or DLNA at launch, according to executive Shuhei Yoshida, and will work on adding these features in a future system software update.
The PS4 launches this week on Friday, November 15, in North America, and Sony confirmed a few weeks ago that the next-gen console wouldn't support at launch MP3 audio files or the DLNA wireless protocol for streaming media.
This announcement generated a backlash from fans, and Sony quickly started saying that it was taking all the feedback into consideration.
Now, Sony's Shuhei Yoshida revealed to GiantBomb that the backlash was quite surprising for Sony's development team.
"The biggest surprise for us all internally at Sony was; there were so many people who passionately reacted to our announcement that there's no MP3 support and DLNA support on day one," he said. "Like we've been saying, the focus has been always on the game features, and some of the features we wanted but we could get in on day one - game features - we were very disappointed."
"We didn't really think about MP3 or DLNA. We always thought that we're going to do that eventually - we've been doing it with all the [PlayStation] products. So it caught us off guard. People don't really talk about these features but when we say we don't have it some people get really mad and [say], 'I cancelled the pre-order'."
As such, Yoshida confirmed that Sony's teams in Japan and the U.S. were discussing just how they can implement support for MP3 and DLNA into the PS4 through a future system software update.
Unfortunately for fans, a concrete time frame isn't available, as Sony is currently focusing on launching the PS4 in North America this week and in Europe on November 29.