Mark Cerny on the PS4: ‘There’s a Lot of Untapped Depth in The Hardware’

Chief system architect for the PlayStation 4 Mark Cerny might be a nervous wreck, but it’s hard to tell. With the PS4 set to launch on November 15th in North America and November 29th in Europe, Cerny is still promoting the power of the console, especially its 8 GB GDDR5 RAM that is shared between its CPU and GPU. Despite the overwhelming power the console already has, there’s still more to come according to Cerny.

“Short term, we can expect some very good games. Long term, we can look forward to the growth in games. There’s a lot of untapped depth in the hardware,” he said to Wired.

Cerny also commented on taking a more collaborative approach with the PS4. “The thought was that we would start with a more open process, a more collaborative look at what worked and what didn’t. I did something that would have been unthinkable in 2004: I went to about 30 game teams about what they would like to see in the next-generation hardware.”

This approach has seemingly worked out, as not only has the PS4 been hailed as the most powerful of the next-gen consoles but also one of the easiest to develop for (which, according to Cerny, saved the Knack dev team a year’s worth of time). Will it elevate Sony back into PS1/PS2 levels of success? We’ll find out in the coming weeks.