PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida to retire in January

Shuhei Yoshida will retire from Sony Interactive Leisure on January 15 subsequent 12 months.

Yoshida has held quite a few management roles at PlayStation since he joined the staff in 1993. His preliminary position concerned working with publishers and builders in Japan to assist them create titles for the primary PlayStation console.

He is most likely greatest identified for his time as president of Worldwide Studios, main PlayStation’s first-party improvement for over a decade between 2008 and 2019. Since 2019, he has led PlayStation’s relationship with indie studios as the pinnacle of PlayStation Indies.

Chatting with the official PlayStation Podcast, Yoshida recounted his early years as a part of Ken Kutaragi’s preliminary PlayStation staff.

“I joined Ken Kutanagi’s staff in February of 1993, once they have been nonetheless growing the unique PlayStation. Ken’s staff had solely engineers. Everybody was engineers. And I used to be the primary non-technical individual to affix the staff as the corporate, Sony Company on the time, began to plan to convey PlayStation to market.”

He continued: “We have been so excited concerning the innovation that Ken’s staff was bringing in, like 3D graphics, real-time expertise, and CD-ROM with plenty of knowledge that we will put in with a low price of producing. And so we had actually excessive hopes, excessive ambitions.

“Nevertheless, we weren’t identified within the online game trade. And there have been different electronics firms, huge firms that attempted to enter the online game trade and, you understand, did not do effectively. So initially earlier than the launch of PlayStation, I believe we weren’t taken very severely from the trade, to be trustworthy.”

He describes his present job of working with indies as his “dream job”. And his fondest reminiscence was when one such small recreation, Journey, was named Sport of the 12 months on the DICE summit in 2013.

“The entire viewers stood up and the entire room was stuffed with happiness and an incredible feeling that this small recreation might have such a big effect on folks’s lives,” he stated.

GamesIndustry.biz final spoke with Shuhei Yoshida in 2023 forward of his BAFTA Fellowship Award. You can read it here.