Sony is on a roll this week, it seems! Having placed the company as the “official leader of the console industry” and blasting Microsoft’s Xbox 360 lifetime possibilities, SCE chairman Kazuo Hirai claims that the PS3 is intentionally difficult to program for in order to ensure that the console meets its promised ten year lifecycle.

“It’s hard to program for, and a lot of people see the negatives of it, but if you flip that around, it means the hardware has a lot more to offer,” Hirai explained. “We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that [developers] want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?”

It’s worth mentioning that Sony did something like this before with the PSP. Though the handheld’s CPU was capable of running at 333MHz, developers were initially limited to using only 222MHz, supposedly to conserve battery life. The company eventually allowed developers to access the processor’s full speed.