It came as a bombshell in November 2024 when PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida suddenly announced that he would be leaving Sony after 31 years. At the time, he was Head of PlayStation Indies, but had previously served as President of SIE Worldwide Studios. It seemed, then, that he had taken a step down the career ladder rather than up, as many had previously believed he would become head of the entire PlayStation division instead of Jim Ryan in 2019.
That obviously didn't happen and Yoshida said in an interview with Game File last year that he believed it was because of his love for games and that he wasn't primarily a businessperson:
"Probably because they didn't trust me as [to] making the best business decisions... I always wanted to do something interesting, you know, something new or innovative and never done before, that may become the great thing in the future, [that] kind of thing.
"Instead, Sony preferred business-minded people, he said at the time, reasoning that "Kaz [Hirai], Andrew [House], Jim Ryan, all business people, right? So there must be a reason for that."
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Last week, Shuhei Yoshida appeared at the Australian gaming event ALT: GAMES, where he shared (via TWIV) more about what happened behind the scenes when he was demoted at PlayStation, on Jim Ryan's orders:
"I helped Santa Monica to make God of War, Naughty Dog to make Uncharted and The Last of Us, and Sucker Punch to make the beautiful Ghost of Tsushima. Ghost of Tsushima was one of the last games that I worked on as the president of Worldwide Studios.
"But in 2019, after 11 years leading first-party development, I was fired from the role."
Yoshida has previously said that he was given an ultimatum to either be fired or become head of indie games, but he now elaborates on what he believes led to this and says that, among other things, he refused to follow Ryan's "ridiculous" orders:
"Jim Ryan wanted to remove me from first-party because I didn't listen to him. He asked me to do some ridiculous things, and I said 'No.'"
Jim Ryan was a controversial and, among gamers, often-questioned head of PlayStation (between 2019 and 2024) who, among other things, launched Sony's massive live service initiative, where virtually all games have either flopped or been shut down. This naturally led to absolutely massive costs, while Sony released fewer single-player games overall because resources were diverted to other areas, something we're still feeling today and will likely continue to feel for years to come.
We'll never know what the PlayStation division would have looked like under Yoshida's leadership, but we can still suspect it would have been radically different. Today, however, Yoshida seems content, and he concludes by saying:
"I was helping indie publishers and developers at Sony for the last five years, so I feel like I'm continuing to do the same kind of thing, but now I am freelance.
"I'm free to show up in any podcast. Now I can talk about Nintendo, Xbox, Steam. And I get to see how Nintendo and Xbox support indies. So it's very, very cool."
What do you think of Jim Ryan's leadership, and do you think Shuhei Yoshida would have been a better alternative?