After 3 decades of bringing great games to life, Shuhei Yoshida is finally ready to move on. The Japanese businessman is renowned for his contributions to the PlayStation brand and the gaming industry in general. As a free agent, Yoshida revealed the one thing that may have permanently burned his bridges at Sony Interactive Entertainment in a recent interview.
Shuhei Yoshida Isn’t a Fan of PlayStation Taking the Live Service Route

After the surge of success live-service games like Fortnite have been experiencing in the past few years, Sony Interactive Entertainment has been working hard to get its slice of the pie. Shuhei Yoshida looked beyond the bigger picture and realized it was a race not worth competing in. During an interview at Kinda Funny Games with Greg Miller, the former Sony boss believed there was no merit in deviating from the working formula.
At around 1:08:50, Miller shifted the discussion toward the current state of the game industry as a whole. While Yoshida is game for any challenge, he was wise enough to realize that the live-service structure is not sustainable regardless of which first-party IP is at the forefront. Yoshida realized early on that the live-service domain was hard to penetrate, especially with the raging success of Call of Duty during the early days of online multiplayer games.
Yoshida is a businessman who has not lost his touch on how the gaming community thinks and reacts. Sony Interactive Entertainment struck gold with its pantheon of great single-player games like God of War, Uncharted, The Last of Us, Ghost of Tsushima, and more; however, the company wanted to be more than that and gave Hermen Hulst, Yoshida’s successor, additional budget to continue to develop single-player titles and create new live-service games. After 31 years in the industry, Yoshida preferred to focus on areas where the company could thrive and not play catch up.
Since this interview, it seems Sony is realizing that Yoshida may have been right, with a spate of live-service cancellations reportedly occurring, including the Horizon MMO, a God of War live-service game and more, and that’s without forgetting Concord, one of the most expensive experiments the gaming industry has ever seen.
Does this represent a change in strategy for PlayStation and Sony? Only time will tell, but Yoshida knew it years before everyone else.
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Rouvin Josef Quirimit is a Content Writer, an avid gamer (on his PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch), and film enthusiast. He was fortunate to grow up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and was enamored by the storytelling of a shared universe full of heart and spectacle. His love for movies led him to great single-player games and he intends to cover major franchises for years to come!