Shuhei Yoshida had been the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios for over a decade when he was suddenly replaced in 2019 by Guerrilla Games studio head Hermen Hulst. It was one in all plenty of stunning shakeups at PlayStation as Jim Ryan took cost forward of the launch of the PS5. Speaking at Australia’s 2026 ALT: Games festival over the weekend, Yoshida shed some extra gentle on the character of his demotion and his last years at Sony.
“I helped Santa Monica to make God of War, Naughty Dog to make Uncharted and The Last of Us, and Sucker Punch to make the beautiful Ghost of Tsushima,” he stated in a speech on the occasion, This Week In Video Games reports. “Ghost of Tsushima was one of the last games that I worked on as the president of Worldwide Studios. But in 2019, after 11 years leading the first-party development, I was fired from the role.”
“Jim Ryan wanted to remove me from first-party because I didn’t listen to him,” he added with a smile and to reported laughter within the room. “He asked to do some ridiculous things, and I said ‘No.’”
While Yoshida didn’t go into additional element on the character of their disagreements, Ryan’s time as CEO at PlayStation noticed the console maker pursue huge acquisitions and enormous investments in live-service video games. Many of the studios bought have been closed or confronted layoffs, and lots of the live-service video games have been canceled or failed at launch.
The most notorious instance of this technique, the hero shooter Concord, was so dangerous that it was rapidly “unreleased,” and the studio behind it, Firewalk, shuttered simply a few years after being purchased. Former Chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden departed the corporate in 2019, simply previous to Yoshida’s demotion, with no actual rationalization on the time. He later insinuated he was additionally a casualty of the brand new live-service push.
“To be honest, you know, the company was making some strategic decisions about where they want to take the platform in the future with a heavy emphasis on games as a service, live-service gaming, subscription formulas, recurring revenue, whatnot, and that was kind of not my wheelhouse,” Layden said in a podcast interview last year.
Unlike Layden, Yoshida stayed on at Sony for the primary half of the PS5 era to assist help indie sport growth on the platform. A well-known face at gaming conventions, scouting for promising tasks and the small groups behind them, Yoshida stated that since his official retirement in 2025, he’s primarily doing the identical work “evangelizing indie games” as he was in his last years at Sony, simply with an opportunity to seek the advice of on Nintendo and Xbox’s platforms as effectively.
