Shu Yoshida left Sony on January 15. He spent 38 years at Sony, including 31 years at PlayStation, and managed many of its big hits.
venturebeat.com
GamesBeat: In the game business, Sony was becoming much more global at the time. It wasn’t as focused on Japan. The decision-making became more global.
Yoshida: Absolutely. That process started in the Andrew House days. Jim Ryan kind of completed it. There was still a transition going on in some ways, but it was pretty much complete. It was a long process. More than five years. Bit by bit. Worldwide Studios was the exception. We were already global in 2005, but all the other parts of the company were divided. Each publisher had to send in three different masters to release games around the world.
Under Jim Ryan, the organization–he removed the individual headquarters. There was no more SCEA. Shawn Layden lost that job. There was no SCE Europe or SCE Japan. He reorganized everything into function-based groups. Global marketing, global sales, global third party, global PR. All the parts of the company became global. It was headquartered in the United States. Jim Ryan was in London, but it was a U.S.-based company. In Japan all the different groups reported to the U.S. or Europe.
GamesBeat: Did that make communication more difficult at first?
Yoshida: The implementation of that globalization was different for each function. The leaders of each different group–one group might treat Japan like a local regional office. The decisions would be made in the U.S. or Europe and later the people in Japan would learn about it. They wouldn’t know what the company was doing. But other groups integrated Japan and treated everyone in the U.S., Japan, or Europe the same. Anyone who could do the job best was assigned a global role. Global manager of this function might be in Japan or in London. A manager in Japan would be fully integrated with the headquarters discussions for that function. It was different for different functions.
GamesBeat: What do you think about how the structure of the business has changed? For a time you had the console cycles, about five years. Now it’s changed.
Yoshida: Right, it’s getting longer. The last cycle was seven years. If it’s seven years, we’ll see a new one in 2027. I have no information about the next PlayStation, but it feels a bit too early for me to say.
The PS5 generation was slowed down because of manufacturing issues.
If the next PlayStation comes out in 2028, that feels right to me. Microsoft had their leak about a 2028 plan. Maybe both of them will come out then. There are diminishing returns from the semiconductors.
GamesBeat: Why did you decide to retire?
Yoshida: Well, I haven’t retired. I left the company. Jim Ryan was the last leader of our generation. Ken Kutaragi, Kaz Hirai, Andrew House, Shawn Layden, myself, we were all the same group from the PS1 days. We handed down to the next generation of management, like Hideaki Nishino and Hermen Hulst. For the last five years my responsibility was to promote indie games inside and outside of PlayStation. I wanted to communicate, especially to new people joining PlayStation, how important it is to support indie games. They create the future. Externally I was communicating to indie developers and publishers that we wanted to make things better for them. Bit by bit, we’ve been able to improve our systems, our store functions, our communication.
A few years back, one of the reasons I got that job from Jim–we’d been criticized by the indie community. They said that PlayStation doesn’t care about indies. You don’t hear that kind of criticism anymore. Last year we had lots of anecdotes from our indie partners that their new games were selling better on PlayStation than any other platform. That’s amazing. Some games sold better on PlayStation than on PC. When I started that work five years ago, our indie partners would say that when they released their games multiplatform, the Switch version would sell three to five times more than PlayStation. Bit by bit, that gap has narrowed down. We have a strong team inside the company supporting indies.