Sony is dashing any hope for us loyal Playstation fans of ever getting our cross-game party chat for PS3. At one point Naughty Dog lead us to believe it was coming in a firmware update. Others once speculated it would be offered in the Playstation Plus subscription. Now, due to a seemingly unrelated announcement about the upcoming Playstation Vita, we have learned the truth. We have been doomed from the start. In an interview with Eurogamer, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida explains why:

"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. Once a game gets RAM we never give it back"

Unlike the PS3 though, the Vita was developed for multi-tasking of specific applications in mind. Not only does the Vita possess twice as much memory as a PS3, but it also has an additional 128MB of virtual memory. Providing the Vita the capability to run something like, say cross-game chat, in the background. Too bad for the PS3 though.

Eurogamer