Shuhei Yoshida has announced plans to exit PlayStation.
As revealed in the PlayStation Blog, Yoshida revealed that he would be leaving the company effective January 15, 2025. He then elaborated:
“I’ve been with PlayStation from the beginning, and this is my 31st year with PlayStation. And when I hit 30 years, I was thinking, hmm, it may be about time for me to move on. You know, the company’s been doing great. I love PS5, I love the games that are coming out on this platform. And we have new generations of management who I respect and admire. And I’m so excited for the future of PlayStation.
So you know, PlayStation is in really good hands. I thought, okay, this is my time.”
Yoshida was one of the founding members of the PlayStation project in 1993. At the time, he managed Sony’s third-party licensing program. So, Yoshida deserves credit for the key partnerships that helped make the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, such as Namco with Ridge Racer and Tekken, Capcom with Resident Evil, Rockstar with Grand Theft Auto, and Square Enix with Final Fantasy.
He steadily rose up the ranks, from vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment America in 2000, Senior Vice President at SCE Worldwide Studios USA in 2007, and most famously, President of SCE Worldwide Studios starting in 2008.
Yoshida fostered a public-facing image of commiserating with gamers and supporting game developers big and small. He would even deflate the console war by talking fondly of Sony’s competitors. One could certainly compare it to the roles that other famous and popular game company bosses like Satoru Iwata and Gabe Newell fostered with gamers.
Yoshida publicly took responsibility for one famous misstep while he was in this role. As SCE Worldwide President, Yoshida declined to publish FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls, as Yoshida himself did not enjoy playing the game’s early demo. FromSoftware would go on to approach Bandai Namco to publish their Dark Souls games.
Yoshida was still in this position when Sony moved to take back their mistake. He helped make the deal for FromSoftware exclusive Bloodborne. Today, even without the Kadokawa deal closing, Sony already owns 14 % of FromSoftware.
Yoshida stepped down in 2019 in a smaller role, to work with independent game creators publishing on PlayStation. At the time, Hermen Hulst took over his SCE Worldwide Studios President role.
Interestingly, when asked if he was retiring, Yoshida replied on Twitter:
“No, I’d like to stay in the industry :)”
You may enjoy reading Phil Spencer’s and David Scott Jaffe’s messages to Yoshida, but what’s interesting to consider here is what Yoshida may be planning to do next. Since he isn’t actually dropping out of the industry like Jim Ryan, what does he want to do outside Sony?
We could see that he could be taking an educator role, in and outside of Japan. Former HAL and Nintendo developer Masahiro Sakurai went independent so that he could do these things, publishing books and holding lectures before he even started his fabled YouTube channel.
The flip side to this is if he goes to another company, to take on a similar role. If that is the case, it would be absolutely possible for hell to freeze over and for Yoshida to work for Nintendo, or even Xbox Japan. But if Yoshida made a parallel move the way Connie Booth did, from Sony to EA, that would suggest that something happened behind the scenes that led to Yoshida’s exit, in the same way that Booth made her exit.
But for now, we would like to congratulate Yoshida for 31 years at PlayStation, and a legacy that has already been etched across the history of the videogame industry.
