Shuhei Yoshida utmärker sig som en av de mer omtyckta personerna bland Playstation-divisionens många ledare under de senaste decennierna. Han tillbringade 38 år hos Sony och blev slutligen president för Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, där han övervakade utvecklingen av otaliga spännande exklusiva produkter, kommunicerade med studios och mycket, mycket annat.
Men 2019 tillträdde han tjänsten som Head of Playstation Indies, vilket fick många att klia sig i huvudet, men det visar sig att tjänsten var ett slags ultimatum för Yoshida, och alternativet var att lämna Playstation helt och hållet. Han säger:
"Well, I had no choice. It was either take the position or leave the company. 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."
Han lämnade Sony helt den 15 januari, men verkar lyckligtvis inte vara helt färdig med spelbranschen.
En älskad före detta Sony-veteran.
