As we’re seeing more and more in the video game space, it’s not just about the dev teams making the games that’s important; it’s those at the top making the decisions for those dev teams that have just as much an impact. If you’re at a company with incredible talent but a terrible leader, then you’re doomed to fail or not make as much of a mark on the industry as you would hope. We’ve seen this many times over the last five years or so across multiple developers and publishers, including Sony with its PlayStation brand. Now, we know why the company has had such a steep downturn in some respects since it transitioned to PS5.
If you don’t recall what we’re talking about, the “Shift” from PS4 to PS5 was truly mind-boggling. The PS4 is easily one of the greatest consoles ever created, with a large library of titles to enjoy from both 1st and 3rd party systems. It easily won its console war and sold over 100 million units to boot! However, once the PS5 came in, there were immediately problems. Sure, Sony couldn’t help some of them due to the pandemic, but on the gaming side of things, numerous decisions from higher-ups were weighing the company down and making the PS5 a place where “there were no games to play.” A man who might have been able to change that was Shuhei Yoshida, the former head of PlayStation Studios. He worked for Sony for 31 years, and yet, in 2019, as revealed by VentureBeat, he was forced to shift to the indie dev side of the company or leave Sony forever:
“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.”
While it’s good that Yoshida was passionate about indies and did his best to help those developers, the impact of his not being with the first-party crews anymore was felt almost immediately. Once he was gone, Jim Ryan pushed hard for live-service games to be made, a move that Yoshida said he would’ve resisted if he was still in charge of those studios.
Now, Sony has canceled several live-service games, it’s still scrambling to save its image, and Yoshida is out of the company. What it does next is anyone’s guess.
