Shuhei Yoshida, the former long-tenured leader of Sony’s first-party PlayStation Worldwide Studios, has said he was fired from the role by Jim Ryan – the boss of PlayStation – because he didn’t listen to him.
“In 2019, after 11 years leading the first-party development, I was fired from the role,” Yoshida told an audience at Australian games event Alt: Games, as reported by This Week in Video Games. “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.'”
This appears to have been said in good humour. As Yoshida later remarked, he and Ryan were part of the same PlayStation generation so they knew each other well. “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,” Yoshida said.
Jim Ryan took over as the head of the PlayStation business in 2019, so this decision to shuffle Yoshida into a new role was part of his takeover. Yoshida, who’d overseen the God of War reboot, The Uncharted series’ creation and The Last of Us, and Ghost of Tsushima, didn’t leave PlayStation when this happened, but took a new role developing PlayStation’s indie catalogue and tempting indie creators there. “I really enjoyed the role of promoting and evangelising indie games,” he told the Alt: Games crowd.
Ryan gave Yoshida’s first-party role to Guerrilla Games boss Herman Hulst, who retains that role now, after coming very close to leading all of PlayStation. Between them, the two reformed PlayStation Worldwide Studios into PlayStation Studios, and Ryan led acquisitions of Spider-Man developer Insomniac Games, Returnal and Saros developer Housemarque, Marathon creator Bungie, Demon’s Souls remaker Bluepoint, which has since closed, and a few more.
Yoshida left PlayStation in 2025, and now runs his own indie game consulting firm Yosp Inc – an independence that means he can now talk about Nintendo, Xbox and Steam, he said while on stage, with a smile.
Jim Ryan left Sony in March 2024.
