Sony to Shuhei Yoshida: Either you take care of the indies, or you leave the company

PlayStation is going to have to look for a successor who can live up to what Shuhei Yoshida has meant to its brand. After 38 years at Sony and 31 in the video game division, he decided to leave PlayStation on 15 January. In a recent interview with GamesBeat's Dean Takahashi during the Dice Summit in Las Vegas, he admitted that he has no plans to leave the industry and will continue to work with indie creators.

He began his career at Sony in 1986, when he finished college, to work on budgets and business deals for the Japanese company. At that time, Ken Kutaragi shaped Sony PlayStation, after an infamous disagreement with Nintendo. Yoshida was unclear about the goals, but his former boss convinced him and he was one of the first 80 people to work on the console.

After its launch, Yoshida had a very important job, convincing Sony's investors that the console was more than just a"toy" and coined the following phrase to define the PlayStation:"world's first virtual reality system". Later, he had to convince Japanese studios to develop titles for his console, who told him directly:"Come back when you've sold a million". He was a great pitch-maker, which earned him a role as a spokesperson for Sony in the following years.

The first PlayStation was a colossal success and Yoshida was part of it, moving to the US and becoming vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment. By 2008 he had become president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios after the departure of Phil Harrison. In that stage and in several occasions he also shared fascinating insight with Gamereactor as a representative of the brand.

But in 2019, Jim Ryan appeared in his path, who was appointed head of PlayStation, and Yoshida had to step aside to become head of PlayStation Indies that same year."There was no choice. It was either take the position or leave the company," Yoshida himself said in the interview. In retrospect, what seemed like a forced role turned out to be a new passion for Yoshida, who is now always close to smaller developers. From the interview:

"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.

A few years back, one of the reasons I got that job from Jim-we'd been criticized by the indie community. They said that PlayStation doesn't care about indies. You don't hear that kind of criticism anymore. Last year we had lots of anecdotes from our indie partners that their new games were selling better on PlayStation than any other platform. That's amazing. Some games sold better on PlayStation than on PC. When I started that work five years ago, our indie partners would say that when they released their games multiplatform, the Switch version would sell three to five times more than PlayStation. Bit by bit, that gap has narrowed down. We have a strong team inside the company supporting indies."

In 2023 he was awarded the BAFTA of Honour for his career in video games. Some of the titles he worked on were Gran Turismo, The Legend of Dragoon, Crash Bandicoot among others, as well as overseeing franchises such as God of War, Uncharted and The Last of Us. A true living legend of the industry. We leave you the whole VB's interview here in case you want to go deeper into his words.

What does Shu Yoshida mean to you?