Sony has announced that Shuhei Yoshida, one of the first members of the PlayStation team and a major figure in the platform's history, is to retire after 38 years with the company, 31 of which were spent on PlayStation. Yoshida joined Sony in 1986 and would find his first role with PlayStation in 1993, when he became responsible for third party licensing, before going on to act as a producer on major titles like Gran Turismo and a supervisor on countless others.
But Yoshida's real legacy for PlayStation is the senior roles he's held since the early 2000s, first as vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, then senior vice president of SCE Worldwide Studios USA—and from 2008, president of SCE Worldwide Studios. Over this time Sony enjoyed the colossal success of the PlayStation 2 and dominated the console market for a spell, before the leaner times of PlayStation 3. But it was with PlayStation 4 that Yoshida became a more public-facing figure for the brand.
The highlight? It has to be PlayStation's response to the disastrous reveal of Xbox One in 2013. Microsoft had made a mess of the console's announcement, and people especially hated that Xbox One would stop you sharing your physical games with friends. Sony's savage response to this was 21 seconds long, and arguably the greatest gaming roast of all time.
Yoshida stepped down as president of SIE Worldwide Studios in 2019, and has since then focused on nurturing smaller titles for the platform as the head of Indies Initiative. To mark his departure he's been interviewed on the PlayStation podcast, and is charming as ever. "It’s like announcing the launch date of a new game," chuckles Yoshida, "[something] I haven’t done for a long time."
Yoshida says "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."
Elsewhere Yoshida reflects on joining Ken Kutaragi's team in February 1993, when they were still building the first PlayStation console. "Ken’s team had only engineers," says Yoshida. "Everyone was engineers. And I was the first non-technical person to join the team at the company." Sony Computer Entertainment would be founded in November that year, and Yoshida remembers the thrill of bringing a genuinely disruptive product into the console marketplace. "We were so excited about the innovation that Ken’s team was bringing in, like 3D graphics, real-time technology, and CD-ROM with lots of data that we can put in with a low cost of manufacturing. And so we had really high hopes, high ambitions.
"However, we were not known in the videogame industry. And there were other electronics companies, big companies that tried to enter the videogame industry and, you know, didn’t do well. So at the beginning before the launch of PlayStation, I think we were not taken very seriously from the industry, to be honest."
Consumers, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get their hands on PlayStation, and one of the major factors in its success was the third party licensing: Its success is unimaginable without launch titles like Ridge Racer and Tekken, nevermind later classics like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy 7, and Metal Gear Solid.
Yoshida is at one stage asked about his best memories at PlayStation. "One time [that] stood out for me in my memory as something really, really special was when Journey got the Game of the Year Award," says Yoshida. "Journey was distributed through PlayStation Network. It was a digital-only, small game. You can finish playing the game within like three hours.
"But that game … [won] Game of the Year against all these AAA titles, I think for the first time in the industry … the creator Jenova Chen did a talk at the summit, and he talked about a letter he received from a girl who lost her father and she thought about her father and she was able to move on in her life.
"The whole audience stood up and the whole room was filled with happiness and an amazing feeling that this small game could have such a big impact on people’s lives."
You can tell he's loved the job: "When I was managing, working with big studios, making AAA games was great." Yoshida says he stumbled into his most recent role because he was always finding indie titles at events and would "take a photo with the developer, trying to help promote these games … that’s what I was doing almost as a hobby. So when I got this job where I could spend 100% of my time helping indies, it was like a dream job."
It is obviously a form of madness trying to guess the personality of corporate executives, but Yoshida has always struck me as an extremely nice man, and in every picture or presentation seems to have a mischievous glint in his eye. He'll officially retire from Sony in January 2025. And then, finally, all those Microsoft executives can stop having nightmares about one smiling Japanese man, and his retail copy of Killzone.
