Sony head Shuhei Yoshida expresses his wishes for PlayStation gamers to be able to change their PSN usernames, but he has doubts that they can make it a reality.

Speaking at Paris Games Week today, Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida explained that the PlayStation team is aware that gamers want to be able to change their PlayStation Network names, but that even he doesn't know if the feature will come to fruition. Yoshida explained that he'd like for gamers to be able to easily change their names, but even he has no idea when, or if at all, the feature can be implemented.

PlayStation gamers have been waiting for this feature for quite a long time, and the frustration has only risen given that Xbox gamers have had the ability all along. However, Shuhei's answer did carry a small spark of hope, as he explained that a team of engineers is trying to work out a way to allow PlayStation gamers to change their usernames.

This news seems to conflict with a prior announcement regarding PSN name changes from Shawn Layden. Speaking last year, Layden explained that it wasn't a matter of technical difficulty, but instead preventing people from abusing the system to repeatedly troll other players with different names.

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However, Yoshida's statement makes it sound like there may indeed be a technical conflict with the idea of name changes. The idea of technical hiccups being behind it probably makes more sense, as something as simple as a waiting period between name changes could prevent a great deal of trolling attempts.

Despite the small bit of hope that Sony's actually looking into it, this probably isn't the news that gamers were hoping to hear. PlayStation gamers have already had to put up with multiple PlayStation Network outages, including extended outages during holidays, like the lengthy Christmas-season outage last year, and the Fourth of July outage this year. These outages have been part of the reason for gamers to create a petition and campaign calling for a better PlayStation Network.

While the campaign was acknowledged by Sony, frustrated gamers are still left wanting, as not much has come from the effort beyond that. Sadly, it seems that gamers who want to leave an old network username behind will either have to abandon their old one and all of its accolades, or put up with keeping the username until the day (if and when) PlayStation creates a solution.

Would you change your username on the PlayStation Network if you could? Let us know in the comments section.

Source: PlayStation France's Twitter