Microsoft’s Phil Spencer is a swell guy. Unlike so many other of the top brasses at Xbox, who always seemed to be out of touch with their core audience, and always seemed to have the wrong idea, Spencer seems to be all about the games, and the gamer. Since coming on board as the head of the department, he’s been in charge of the cheaper Xbox One, the changed policies of Xbox Live that are more consumer friendly, and an increased emphasis on games, just to name a few. He has also been extremely respectful of his competition at Sony and Nintendo.

Sony Worldwide Studios’ Shuhei Yoshida has noticed all this, and he seems to be a fan. Speaking to Eurogamer, he said, “His attitude [at E3] was great. I read and listened to his interviews, and he’s a reasonable, smart guy, compared to some other people who used to say some unbelievable things.”

In general, Yoshida seems to be a lot more appreciative of Microsoft and the competition that Xbox provides than Sony’s presenters at E3, who were taking needless potshots at Microsoft, were. Which is a good thing. Competition is well and good, but good grace and a sporting spirit never hurt anybody either.

Historically, there has been a bit of bad blood between Sony and Nintendo (with the latter’s ditching of the former being what caused the creation of the PlayStation in the first place), but in recent years, both of them have grown increasingly more respectful of each other.

This came to a crescendo yesterday: in an interview with IGN‘s Greg Miller, Shuhei Yoshida was asked about Nintendo’s Wii U. Greg Miller took the opportunity to start ragging on the console and its many issues, before Yoshida cut him off, stating that the Wii U was a great console, and that he actually owned two of them (he even has a Miiverse account). “Nintendo makes great family friendly games,” he said, adding that he loved to play the console with his daughter.

Speaking about Nintendo’s larger place in the gaming industry, he said, “I think Nintendo and us are pretty much in the same group,” Yoshida said. “We need Nintendo to be very successful, to help induct as many consumers who like to play games with controllers, right? With sticks and buttons. Because we believe they are great things. We need each other, I think, to create a bigger story.”

This is a lovely and very sporting thing to say, and a far cry from the Sony of the PS3 era that always loved belittling the competition.

Yoshida gets it: the console wars aside, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all need each other to achieve anything and to keep each other in check.

We all knew the reason why Sony was unable to implement cross-game chat, after it was such a most requested feature. Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida has revealed that it is indeed due to RAM.

“Once a game gets RAM we never give it back,” he said. “It’s not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact.”

“The game has to use its own memory to do [in-game voice chat]. There’s always voice chat in the game. But it’s a part of a game feature. It’s not a part of an OS feature. That’s the reason in terms of the ability to have voice chat across different games.”

However, the Playstation Vita has a lot more RAM, and has the cross game chat feature. So, if you are expecting a magical firmware update for the PS3, that enables cross-game chat, it won’t happen.

EG