Shuhei Yoshida Says He ‘Had No Choice’ But to Take on Indies Role at PlayStation

by
William D’Angelo
, posted 21 hours ago / 1,711 Views

Shuhei Yoshida, the former President of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios from 2008 to 2019, in an interview with VentureBeat said he was he was forced to step down to take over the role of the Head of Indies Initiative.

“Moving from first-party to indies? Well, I had no choice,” said Yoshida when asked if he faced any personal challenges with the shift to indie developers. “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.”

Yoshida left Sony Interactive Entertainment on January 15 of this year after working at the company for 31 years.

He did reveal that while he has left Sony Interactive Entertainment, he has yet to retire.

“Well, I haven’t retired,” said Yoshida. “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 life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Bluesky.

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