Shu Yoshida has graduated. He just completed 38 years at Sony, including 31 years at PlayStation, and he completed his last day at the big Japanese company’s gaming division on January 15.
While he’s leaving an illustrious career in the PlayStation business, Yoshida told me in an interview that he’s not done with gaming. He still plans on working with indie game makers, which was his final assignment at Sony Interactive Entertainment. He joined Sony in 1986, right out of college, and went to work in corporate strategy to review budgets and look for new businesses for Sony.
At the time, Ken Kutaragi, seeking revenge against Nintendo after it reneged on an agreement to work with Sony on a game console, pitched and won approval for creating the Sony PlayStation. Yoshida didn’t believe Kutaragi could pull off his plan to do workstation-level 3D graphics on a $500 game console. But his former boss urged Yoshida to join and he took the plunge into the unknown. Yoshida became one of the first 80 people working on the PlayStation.
The system debuted in December 1994 in Japan and in 1995 in the U.S. It turned out to be a huge hit, and Yoshida had to create a deck to impress Kutaragi’s bosses. Some viewed the PlayStation as a “toy” that would tarnish the Sony brand. Yoshida pitched the PlayStation as the “world’s first virtual reality system.” Once Sony moved forward, Yoshida had to convince Japanese game developers and publishers to make games for the system.
As the PlayStation succeeded, Yoshida climbed up the ranks, moving to the U.S. and becoming a vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment. He became president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios in 2008, after Phil Harrison left to run Atari. In 2019, as Jim Ryan became the head of the PlayStation business, Yoshida stepped down from that role and became head of PlayStation Indies in 2019. Of that move, he said he had no choice. It was take that indie job or leave the company. In 2023, he received a BAFTA Fellowship for his work in games.
Among the titles he worked on were Gran Turismo, The Legend of Dragoon, Ape Escape, Crash Bandicoot, Crash Team Racing and Spyro 2: Ripto’s Range. He oversaw development on best-selling franchises including God of War, Uncharted and The Last of Us. He also became a popular spokesman for Sony, often leading the company’s responses to gamers on social media.
I caught up with Yoshida at the Dice Summit this week in Las Vegas. (I also interviewed the retiring Ted Price of Insomniac Games and Don James of Nintendo). We talked about those memories and more. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Are you enjoying yourself?
Shuhei Yoshida: Everybody I meet says I look relaxed and happy. Now I don’t have to get pre-approval from the PR department for interviews.
GamesBeat: I was looking at some of the early stories. What was your first job at Sony?
Yoshida: I joined Sony in 1986 as a new college graduate. New graduates in Japan get assigned to different groups. You don’t know what you’ll be doing. My assignment was in a group called corporate strategy, the headquarters team. The executives reported to president Norio Ohga. One group’s job was to look over finance and budget planning. The other group was people chasing subjects that they felt were important for the president to know about.
One topic was to look for new business seeds. There were many business groups within Sony. Each group had some interesting R&D going on that might become a new business. One of those was Ken Kutaragi’s team. His team made the audio chip for the Super Nintendo. They were working with Nintendo on the CD system for the Super Nintendo.
These potential new businesses, one of us was assigned to each of them. I wasn’t assigned to Ken’s project, but one of my colleagues was. He wasn’t a gamer. I was advising him about which companies to look at. “If it’s 3D, you should talk to Namco.” Things like that. I was a huge video game fan. Our boss at headquarters remembered that I knew about games.
Years later, when I was working in the PC department on notebooks, I got a call from him, and he said that I should meet with this guy Ken Kutaragi. I met him, and Ken explained what he was working on. At the time, Silicon Graphics workstations were thousands of dollars. He said, “I’m making a video game system with the same power as a workstation. We’ll sell it for $500.” I said, “Wow, that’s great,” but I didn’t actually believe him.
I went back to my old boss and said, “Ken has to be lying.” He said, “No, seriously, I believe him.” So I said, “Let me in!” That’s how I joined Ken’s team, in February of 1993. The interesting thing is that two weeks after I joined Ken’s team, he came in as Ken’s boss. He was gathering people he knew that he thought he could use.
GamesBeat: How soon did the PlayStation idea come around? I know about the deal with Nintendo that fell apart.
Yoshida: When I joined Ken’s team he was already working on the final PlayStation, our own proprietary hardware. The breakup with Nintendo had happened maybe a year before. I was in the U.S. at the time, earning my MBA at UCLA. I was a sponsored student from Sony. We were watching coverage of CES. Sony was going to announce the original PlayStation, the SNES-compatible one. But the day before the announcement, Nintendo announced their alliance with Phillips. I remember seeing that announcement and wondering what was going on, because I knew about the original plan.
GamesBeat: Did you believe the PlayStation was going to succeed? What did you think about the plan?
Yoshida: I was a huge video game fan. When I joined Sony out of college, somehow I believed or expected that Sony might get into the game in the future. When it happened, I wanted to be in that group. My personal goal became to work and help the team succeed so I could keep working in video games.
GamesBeat: What led Sony to believe that a console was the way to go, compared to doing something with PCs that might be more powerful every year?
Yoshida: Sony had already been in the PC business with MSX, the 8-bit personal computer. Consumers saw how much more powerful the NES was when it came out compared to the MSX at the time, though, and it was way cheaper. It was half the price and played great games, better games than the hobbyist PCs of the time.
Ken’s team had worked with Nintendo on the SNES, and Sony was more of a consumer electronics company. That naturally led them toward the console business. Ken and his team saw the opportunity of 3D graphics coming. That was already popular in the arcades and with some PC games. They designed a realtime 3D graphics chip. We saw the opportunity to release the first real 3D console.
GamesBeat: What was your first job within that group?
Yoshida: When I joined Ken’s team, everyone else there was an engineer. They were making the hardware and the system software. The first thing Ken asked me was to put together a presentation he could show to Sony’s executives and convince them that Sony should invest in this business. At the time there were still questions from some of the executives. We faced some criticism. “Sony shouldn’t get into the game business. This is just a kid’s toy. It will tarnish the Sony brand.”
I put together a presentation saying that PlayStation would be the world’s first virtual reality system. Namco was advertising Ridge Racer as a virtual reality experience. “This isn’t a video game. This is a virtual reality system!” Virtual reality was a buzzword at the time. That was my first assignment. But my real job was to talk to the publishers and developers in Japan and recruit them to make games for PlayStation. I made phone calls to every company from Hokkaido to Kyushu and put together a tour plan. I brought all the leaders together and a group of us visited each company to pitch 3D graphics and movie-like features.
Most companies, especially companies making games for the Super Nintendo, didn’t get it. They thought 3D graphics would only work for shooters and racing games. The kinds of games they were making, they didn’t think they could use 3D. The PlayStation didn’t have background memory or sprites. They didn’t know how to make games any other way. But a couple of companies really loved it. Namco had already made a lot of 3D arcade games that they couldn’t leverage in the consumer business. They thought the PlayStation would be a great outlet for their games.
Namco proposed–it was amazing. They had been designing their own proprietary hardware boards for arcade games. They had their own hardware development and manufacturing. However, the executive responsible said, “I’d like to just use PlayStation as our next arcade board.” They asked us to create an arcade board version of the first PlayStation and ship them. The first game they made with it was Tekken. They made Tekken, released it in the arcades, and three months later they released it for the console. That was the shortest time they had ever been able to convert an arcade game to a console. That was their strategy. They became our biggest ally.
Some other PC-based developers had also been experimenting with 3D graphics on computers like the Sharp X68000. That was a popular hobbyist PC that had some 3D capabilities. You had small companies, independent teams making 3D games on that PC, and they jumped on the PlayStation. One of them was the team that made Jumping Flash. So we were able to find some allies. But most of the major companies, other than Namco, preferred to wait and see.
GamesBeat: Did your job start to revolve around interacting with developers a lot?
Yoshida: Right. I became the lead account manager for the Japanese publishers and developers. Our goal was to get all the major games in Japan to come to the PlayStation. At the time there were two big teams working with Nintendo, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. For the Japanese audience, those were the most popular games. When a new one came out you had long lines of customers waiting to buy them. It made the national news when a new Dragon Quest came out. There was controversy over kids calling out sick from school to stay home and play games.
Of course, initially they weren’t interested. They were close to Nintendo. But Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, loved the potential of CDs. His dream was to create a movie-like Final Fantasy game. He was disappointed when he learned that the Nintendo 64 still used cartridges. His movies couldn’t fit there. Squaresoft tried to convince Nintendo to change that plan, but they wouldn’t. They didn’t believe in CD-ROM at all. That’s why they licensed the Super Nintendo add-on project to Sony in the first place, because they believed CD-ROM was just too slow to ever make for a good game system.
Our team–my boss was a schmoozer. He’d come from Sony Music. He hung out a lot with the executives from Squaresoft, throwing parties at his apartment. Eventually we were able to get Squaresoft to commit to the PlayStation. They brought all their franchises from Nintendo to the PlayStation. Enix – at the time it was a separate company – saw them move to the PlayStation and decided to bring over Dragon Quest as well. They always wanted to release Dragon Quest on the console with the largest installed base.
GamesBeat: I remember interviewing the CEO of LSI Logic about their PlayStation chip in Silicon Valley at the time. That was a big deal for them.
Yoshida: Jensen Huang worked there early, right? He started Nvidia after.
GamesBeat: At the time there were maybe 80 different 3D graphics startups in Silicon Valley. 3DFX and Nvidia and all that. It was a fun time. What were some of the most difficult challenges for PlayStation in those early days?
Yoshida: Initially, of course, it was getting the installed base. Major publishers told us, “Sure, we’ll bring you our games if you can sell a million units of hardware quickly.” For a video game publisher, the installed base was everything. The graphics, the power of the system didn’t mean anything. It was all the installed base. Our marketing department created TV commercials in Japan saying that we were going to sell a million units. That was a message to the industry. We were able to do it, and those companies kept their promises to us.
Initially, in Japan, the Sega Saturn was a very strong competitor. They had Virtua Fighter the first year, and the second year they had Virtua Fighter 2. Those were the most popular arcade games at the time. Until we announced that Final Fantasy VII was coming to the PlayStation, the Saturn was actually doing better. That was the most difficult time. When we brought PlayStation to the U.S. and Europe, they already had momentum. We announced we were selling the system for $100 cheaper than the Saturn, though. You see that pattern in different generations, like the 360 versus the PS3 or the Xbox One versus the PS4. That $100 makes a huge difference.
The U.S. and European launches went very well. All the Japanese launch titles were there, plus we had U.S.-made sports games and European games like Wipeout. But the second year of the original PlayStation was very hard. I was very concerned. PS3 was another hard time. At the time I was part of management, so I could see the financials. We were losing a billion dollars. I thought PlayStation was finished. But luckily, at that time Sony’s flatscreen TVs were hugely popular. The TV group was making enough money to cover the losses from the PS3 and we were able to survive. But that was the most difficult time. Another one was the PSN outage. It lasted months. It’s unbelievable how hard that was internally.
GamesBeat: Do you remember the development of Crash Bandicoot? How early did that arrive?
Yoshida: That was 1996, the second year in the U.S. and Europe and the third year in Japan. I started in the third-party department as the lead account manager. At the beginning of 1996, right after that difficult Christmas in the second year when Sega launched Virtua Fighter 2, the marketing department did a TV commercial about all the third-party games. Final Fantasy VII is coming to PlayStation! That made a huge impact. We learned from Enix that they’d decided to bring Dragon Quest as well.
At the third-party relations team I felt like we’d lost our goal. We were getting Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. We didn’t have anything else in Japan in terms of popular IP to target. But then, in March or April, SCEA did their deal with Universal Interactive, Mark Cerny’s company, to globally publish Crash Bandicoot as a first-party game. We got the license from Mark to publish Crash and Spyro the Dragon. It was a global deal.
SCEA asked the Japan team to assign a producer to the project, but the first-party team in Japan didn’t have anyone who could speak English on the production team. The head of game development asked me if I was interested in moving over to become a producer, and I said yes. That was how I got my job as the localization producer for Crash Bandicoot. That was my first title. But that work didn’t fill all my time, so they asked me to grow the internal studio as well. At the time there was only one internal team making games, which was Kazunori Yamauchi’s team. They were finishing the second Motor Toon Grand Prix game and starting to work on their third project. That was Gran Turismo. So the first two projects I was given as a producer were Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo. It was a lucky start.
I started gathering and hiring other people. That led to Ape Escape, Legend of Dragoon, and ICO internally. I was able to finish Ape Escape and Legend of Dragoon before I moved to the U.S., but we weren’t able to finish ICO. Ueda-san’s vision was a bit too much for the system’s performance. The game was running, but only at 10 or 15 frames per second. I decided to move that to the PS2, and then I moved to the U.S. Another producer helped finish that game and release it on the PS2. Crash Bandicoot was my first product, though. Mark Cerny and Naughty Dog taught me a lot. They trained me as a producer.
GamesBeat: Was there a particular part of Sony that was handling that? Was that game development or production?
Yoshida: Game production was the first-party team, and then there was the third-party relations team. Part of third-party relations was developer support. I brought in a couple of people I knew from the PC department at Sony to join the developer relations group. One of them was Izumi Kawanishi, who’s now head of the Sony Honda group.
GamesBeat: It’s an interesting collection of people that all came together through PlayStation. In the U.S. I remember going out to visit Kaz Hirai and Jack Tretton and Andrew House.
Yoshida: One of my colleagues who joined Sony in the same year out of college, we were assigned to the same group. I mentioned that there was one part of the headquarters team that was working on financials. He was assigned to that group. He was doing budgeting and sales reports and I was doing support for other businesses. When I joined Ken’s team in Japan, he joined SCEA at the start. We almost grew up together. We were friends for a long, long time. He’s now president of Sega, Shuji Utsumi.
GamesBeat: There was a CES dinner I went to. I remember Ando-san was there. I asked him what he thought about Microsoft trying to get into the business with Xbox. He said that they had a nice launch, but by the time they sold their first unit Sony had sold 25 million PS2s. That battle was almost over before Microsoft got started.
Yoshida: They launched very late. I remember the launch year of Xbox, the first one. Bill Gates came to Japan and did the keynote at the Tokyo Game Show. That showed they were serious. Part of what instigated them was Ken saying that the PlayStation was going to be the computer in the living room. That was the vision. Microsoft thought they were going to take a market away from them and decided they couldn’t let it happen. In a way, Ken created our own competition when he said that. Later Ken wanted us to become something like Intel, making the Cell processor. In his mind he was always thinking bigger than the game business.
GamesBeat: Did you have your own feelings about the Cell processor at the time?
Yoshida: What I knew before the launch was that it was a supercomputer chip, very powerful. But everyone in the game teams and the engineering teams said it was super hard to make games with it. By that time, no one was programming for multiprocessor. The programmers had to divide the game programming into smaller chunks and keep all that programming work synchronized. It was very hard.
GamesBeat: Would it still be considered hard today, now that everything is multi-core?
Yoshida: Yeah, the industry changed. But when PS3 launched, that was the first time many programmers had faced that. Our graphics hardware was less powerful than the Xbox 360 as well, the Nvidia chip. Mark Cerny and the Naughty Dog engineers would use the Cell processor, which was powerful but hard to use, to help render the graphics. Part of the CPU would do the GPU’s job. That became our internal game engine.
GamesBeat: It must have been a tough transition from PS2 to PS3. A lot of the organization changed.
Yoshida: Right. Ken was removed. Kaz moved from the U.S. to Japan. But that helped me to–many things were happening at the time. Kaz took over from Ken. We built our global group of game developers, Worldwide Studio. Phil Harrison was the first president. He was head of game development in Europe and I was head in the United States. When we merged to create Worldwide Studios he became president and we were working together. But he left to become the president of Atari, and Kaz asked me to succeed him. At the same time I would move back from the U.S. to Japan to work with the hardware team.
Kaz announced that for the future PlayStation–up until the PS3 it was a hardware engineer’s dream machine. Going forward, the hardware team would have to work with the game teams to design the next PlayStation. I had been working with Mark on the game team projects, the Naughty Dog and Insomniac projects, and I knew Mark was a hardware genius as well. I helped connect him with a hardware person, Masa Chatani, who at the time was CTO. You might have read his book. I brought him into Ken’s group. I helped Masa sign a contract with Mark to become the system architect for the PS Vita and PS4. That’s how he started working on the PlayStation hardware.
The first thing we did, with Mark and the game studios’ help–the design of the PS Vita was already ongoing. But they evaluated it and asked Masa and the hardware team to change the SOC. It was too weak. They agreed to upgrade the system. That was the start of the relationship between the hardware group and the studio group. The reason Kaz asked me to move back to Japan was so that I could work closely with the hardware group. I joined every hardware discussion on Vita and PS4. I connected the hardware team with the key studio people to discuss different issues. If it was the controller, I connected them with game designers. If it was a system thing, they’d talk to lead programmers.
One thing that made me very happy about the collaboration–the PS4 had the Share button, right? That idea came from Santa Monica Studios. One of the game designers put together a presentation about how game streaming on YouTube and Twitch was becoming popular. Why not make a dedicated button on the controller so anyone could be a YouTuber? We presented that to the hardware team and they loved it. They moved one button and made it the Share button. I was so proud when that happened.
GamesBeat: I remember when the Xbox group was starting up, one thing the American developers said was that they got no information from the Japanese companies. They’d get dev kits, but very late, and all the documentation was in Japanese.
Yoshida: There’s a funny story. I don’t know if this has been published before. Talking about PlayStation, because we were launching in Japan first, we’d start to sign licensing contracts with publishers and developers and send out dev kits, but only in Japan. Mark Cerny visited us and asked for a dev kit. I told him, “No, we’re only signing contracts with Japanese developers right now.” He said, “Well, can I become a Japanese developer?” I said, “Sorry, but we only have contracts written in Japanese.” He said, “That’s no problem, give me one.” The next day he came back with his signature on it. Crystal Dynamics, his U.S. company, became the first company with a dev kit.
Later on he told me what he’d done. He hadn’t consulted with headquarters at all. He just signed the deal himself and came back to my office with it. That caused some problems later on. But that’s how he got the first dev kit for an American company. He could read Japanese, of course. He’d worked for Sega in Japan, working with Yuji Naka to make Sonic the Hedgehog. He was able to take advantage of that.
GamesBeat: It was interesting how it became a global business over the years. When Xbox was pretty well established, they had something like 1,100 developers, and Sony had around 2,500 around the world. I looked at that number and thought Xbox just couldn’t win. A big part of what they had was Microsoft Flight Simulator, and that wasn’t a console game.
Yoshida: But they did have Halo. I moved to the U.S. in 2000 and I became a board member of the AIAS. At that time Ed Fries was on the board as well, from Microsoft. We became friends. He’s a game guy. I remember when he was leaving Microsoft. He wrote that story, right? About Halo 2, when the company pushed him to launch by Christmas, and he said, “Over my dead body.” I asked Ed why he was leaving. He said, “Well, that can work only once. I have to leave now.” Before Phil Spencer, he was the only real game guy there, in my view, in a leading position at Xbox.
GamesBeat: You stayed at Sony for decades. That’s rare in this business. Was there ever a point when you almost left? Did you ever say something like that? “I’m gonna quit if you don’t do this!”
Yoshida: I’ve been lucky. My initial goal in joining Ken’s team was to make PlayStation successful so I could keep working in the video game business. I got my job as a producer, and then head of development in the United States, and then head of Worldwide Studios. I really enjoyed first-party game development. The teams I worked with – Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Media Molecule, Guerrilla Games – were really creative people. I enjoyed the jobs I was doing. I was worried that PS3 might crash the company, but luckily that didn’t happen. So in my mind, all those years I was enjoying myself.
GamesBeat: When Mark Cerny came in in a bigger way, how did the transition from Cell to x86 go? Was that an easy or obvious decision, or was that difficult?
Yoshida: I wasn’t deeply involved in the SOC selection process. But we learned quickly that–the biggest thing for PS4 and PS Vita was to make the system easier for game developers. The PC architecture was the obvious choice. There was no other choice. And there was some secret sauce that Mark could work with in the SOC, some space available. What to put in and what to take out.
GamesBeat: You expected PS4 to do well, then? Did you think that would be a good recovery for Sony?
Yoshida: From a game development standpoint, yeah. We loved the system. Up to PS3, the system was already designed. Even our first-party development teams were notified after the fact. One day we were told, “The next controller has a motion sensor.” What? They asked us to create a demo a week before E3. Make a demo with this motion sensor. They kept everything secret. I couldn’t believe they did that. The Warhawk team did it, and Ken loved it. But that was the relationship. It was like the Great Wall of China.
Starting with PS4 and PS Vita, that wall broke down. We became part of the hardware design process. We loved that. Lots of things about the hardware came from ideas and feedback from the game team. So we loved the system. We knew what we were getting. We were making prototypes based on the hardware prototypes. But we still didn’t know if it was going to succeed, until Microsoft made some great decisions for us. They put the ball on the tee and let us take our swing. We couldn’t have asked for better competition.
GamesBeat: In the game business, Sony was becoming much more global at the time. It wasn’t as focused on Japan. The decision-making became more global.
Yoshida: Absolutely. That process started in the Andrew House days. Jim Ryan kind of completed it. There was still a transition going on in some ways, but it was pretty much complete. It was a long process. More than five years. Bit by bit. Worldwide Studios was the exception. We were already global in 2005, but all the other parts of the company were divided. Each publisher had to send in three different masters to release games around the world.
Under Jim Ryan, the organization–he removed the individual headquarters. There was no more SCEA. Shawn Layden lost that job. There was no SCE Europe or SCE Japan. He reorganized everything into function-based groups. Global marketing, global sales, global third party, global PR. All the parts of the company became global. It was headquartered in the United States. Jim Ryan was in London, but it was a U.S.-based company. In Japan all the different groups reported to the U.S. or Europe.
GamesBeat: Did that make communication more difficult at first?
Yoshida: The implementation of that globalization was different for each function. The leaders of each different group–one group might treat Japan like a local regional office. The decisions would be made in the U.S. or Europe and later the people in Japan would learn about it. They wouldn’t know what the company was doing. But other groups integrated Japan and treated everyone in the U.S., Japan, or Europe the same. Anyone who could do the job best was assigned a global role. Global manager of this function might be in Japan or in London. A manager in Japan would be fully integrated with the headquarters discussions for that function. It was different for different functions.
GamesBeat: What do you think about how the structure of the business has changed? For a time you had the console cycles, about five years. Now it’s changed.
Yoshida: Right, it’s getting longer. The last cycle was seven years. If it’s seven years, we’ll see a new one in 2027. I have no information about the next PlayStation, but it feels a bit too early for me to say. The PS5 generation was slowed down because of manufacturing issues. If the next PlayStation comes out in 2028, that feels right to me. Microsoft had their leak about a 2028 plan. Maybe both of them will come out then. There are diminishing returns from the semiconductors.
GamesBeat: Some of the problem we have today is that it’s been too long, though. We’re getting a Switch 2 after eight years. The last two and a half years have been tough for developers. The stretching out of the cycle, the drop after the pandemic–there’s not enough new to get consumers excited. I don’t know if you saw Matthew Ball’s big slide deck about how the game industry got stuck in 2024, why things have slowed down, why all the layoffs happened. Do you have your own perspective?
Yoshida: I think it’s an overreaction to the COVID situation. Companies invested too much, including ourselves. Then we had to face reality and make adjustments. If you take out the COVID years you’d have smoother growth over the years.
GamesBeat: Why did you decide to retire?
Yoshida: 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.
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.
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.
GamesBeat: Did you face any personal challenges handing some of the biggest developers over for others to deal with? And then you went to focus on the smallest game companies.
Yoshida: 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.
GamesBeat: A lot of the game community are very enthusiastic, but they can also be hostile. They see a buggy game and they get so mad at the developer. You were very successful at spreading joy in the industry. It seems like people were never mad at you. They reacted very well to the things you said. You communicated well. That was a real achievement when you look at how people seem to be mad at everyone else.
Yoshida: Gamers are the reason we can do our jobs. Making games, selling games, promoting games, writing about games. Without our customers, none of that happens. For me, everyone is a customer. Hopefully they play games. Yes, they’re passionate, so they might get mad. But they only have so much money. Spending $70 is a big investment. If a game is buggy, if it’s not polished, of course they get upset. They had other choices for spending that money. I have a basic appreciation for our customers and who they are.
It’s just a matter of perspective. You can’t look at things from just one angle. If you tell someone, “Yes, that’s one angle, but have you thought about it like this?” they might change their mind. That’s what I’ve tried to do.
GamesBeat: So are you still going to work with indies?
Yoshida: Oh, yeah. I love working with these younger, talented developers. They come up with amazing games every year. Every year when you come to one of these events, a couple of the nominees for game of the year are indies. They’re bringing something exciting to the industry. It’s a lot of fun. That’s my dream job, to be able to help them.
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