PS3 gamers have been waiting forever for cross-game chat to come to the console, and it looks like they’ll be waiting forever more too – according to Sony, there’s just not enough memory to go around.<\/p>\n
“Once a game gets RAM we never give it back,” the company’s Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida tells Eurogamer<\/a>. “It’s not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n One has to wonder, though, why it’s wasn’t an OS feature in the first place, or even now.<\/p>\n The PS3 features a total of 512 MB RAM, divided up between 256 MB of system RAM and 256 MB of video RAM. By contrast, the Xbox 360 also features a total of 512 MB RAM, but this is shared between the system and video, making space for some flexibility and – significantly – cross-game chat support.<\/p>\n