In a recent feature that explored his career at PlayStation, Shuhei Yoshida revealed that he was asked to step down from his role as head of PlayStation first party studios and instead focus on managing indie games or leave the company. Yoshida, who has been a prominent figure at PlayStation since the PS1 days, explained that the choice was presented to him by Jim Ryan at a time when the company was reexamining its priorities.
Yoshida recalled his conversation during an interview with GamesBeat. He stated, “Well, I haven’t retired. I left the company. Jim Ryan was the last leader of our generation. Ken Kutaragi, Kaz Hirai, Andrew House, Shawn Layden, myself, we were all the same group from the PS1 days. We handed down to the next generation of management, like Hideaki Nishino and Hermen Hulst. For the last five years my responsibility was to promote indie games inside and outside of PlayStation. I wanted to communicate, especially to new people joining PlayStation, how important it is to support indie games. They create the future. Externally I was communicating to indie developers and publishers that we wanted to make things better for them. Bit by bit, we’ve been able to improve our systems, our store functions, our communication.”
Yoshida went on to detail the challenges of his new role. He explained further, “When I got the job, I told Jim that I didn’t want to create a department. There were enough verticals in the company. Coordinating a department is hard already. I didn’t want to create another vertical. I worked through the existing organization. My personal goal, when I started the indie job, was to make my position obsolete. The company would be doing so well that there was no need for someone like me to tell everyone that this was important. I feel like we’ve achieved that pretty well. There’s still a lot we can do, but people are working on it. You had the combination of Jim leaving and Nishino and Hermen stepping up, and I felt good about the state of our support for indies. I decided to leave.”
When questioned about his transition from managing major first party titles to focusing on indie games the executive commented, “Moving from first-party to indies? Well, I had no choice. When Jim asked me to do the indie job, the choice was to do that or leave the company. But I felt very strongly about the state of PlayStation and indies. I really wanted to do this. I believed I could do something unique for that purpose. That was the bigger change for me personally, moving from first-party to indies, than leaving the company this year. I’m very lucky that the indie community, the publishers and developers I work closely with–they believed that they could use my help. I became an adviser for some of these companies. I’m continuing to work with some of the indie publishers and developers I respect. The transition out of Sony to becoming an independent adviser is less of a change than moving out of first-party.”
Shuhei Yoshida managed PlayStation First-Party Studios during the PS4 generation, overseeing the successful launch of several notable games, including the God of War reboot, The Last of Us, Horizon Forbidden West, and Ghost of Tsushima. He also played a key role in bringing indie developers back into the spotlight on PlayStation by providing marketing support and assistance for various indie titles.
