Shuhei Yoshida, former lead helming Sony's first-party PlayStation Studios, explains he was "fired" from his role for not listening to ex-boss Jim Ryan.
Speaking at Australian festival ALT: GAMES this year, as reported by This Week in Video Games, Yoshida recalls his time at PlayStation Worldwide Studios.
"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 says. "Ghost of Tsushima was one of the last games that I worked on as the president of Worldwide Studios."
After helping work on the action-adventure game, Yoshida alleges that's when he was "fired" by Jim Ryan. "But in 2019, after 11 years leading the first-party development, I was fired from the role," he claims – albeit seemingly all in good humor.
"Jim Ryan wanted to remove me from first-party because I didn't listen to him. He asked to do some ridiculous things, and I said, 'No.'" I'll stress the whole "good humor" thing here, though.
After all, Yoshida goes on to look back on how well he and Ryan knew each other: "Because I grew up with Jim from the PS1 days… you don't want to have one of your friends as one of your subordinates."
I do suppose that's true – and Ryan did offer Yoshida his role to improve PlayStation's support of indie development, "because everybody in the company knew how much I loved indie games," as the industry legend puts it.
All in all, Yoshida spent a whopping 31 years at PlayStation in total, retiring in early 2025 after saying, "It may be about time for me to move on."
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