Shuhei Yoshida, the 30-year PlayStation veteran who left the company in 2025, has shed more light regarding the situation that culminated in his eventual exit from the company. He said at the ALT: GAMES event recently in Australia that after 11 years leading Worldwide Studios, he was “fired from the role.”
As reported by This Week In Video Games, Yoshida said he was fired from that job in 2019 in part because he refused to listen to PlayStation’s top boss, Jim Ryan. He retired in 2024.
“Jim Ryan wanted to remove me from first-party because I didn’t listen to him,” he said. “He asked to do some ridiculous things, and I said, ‘No.'”
Hermen Hulst, the co-founder of Killzone and Horizon studio Guerrilla Games, succeeded Yoshida in that role, with Yoshida taking over as the leader of PlayStation’s team heading up support for external independent creators.
“Everybody in the company knew how much I loved indie games,” he said. “I really enjoyed the role of promoting and evangelizing indie games.”
Yoshida previously talked about how he had “no choice” but to take the new indie-focused job at PlayStation, because it was either take the job or leave.
Ryan reportedly gave a mandate that Sony’s studios build live-service games to capitalize on the trend, and this was said to have upset a number of developers. The blame apparently fell on PlayStation legend Connie Booth, and she left the company. She now works at EA.
Sony was at one point planning to release 12 new live-service games, but the company later halved its expected output. While Helldivers 2 and the MLB The Show series have been called out by Sony as bright spots for its live-service releases, the same cannot be said for Concord. That game launched in August 2024 and had such a troubled launch that Sony shut the game down and closed the studio.
Following that, Sony implemented a system with “more rigorous and more frequent testing” to help avoid another Concord-like failure. Sony’s latest live-service release was Bungie’s Marathon, but the company has not yet shared any details about the game’s performance. Sony’s next earnings report will be released on May 8, at which time the company may provide new details.
Yoshida did not elaborate on what those “ridiculous things” that Ryan asked him to do might have been. However, Yoshida previously said he would have resisted Sony’s live-service push if he were in charge.