Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios and champion of indies, has announced he’s leaving the company after 31 years.
After more than three decades at PlayStation, Shuhei Yoshida has announced he’ll be stepping down from his role at the company as the head of indies initiative. Yoshida has overseen a huge number of games across his time at PlayStation, with 429 titles total over his entire career, and has long been a strong voice for indies at the company. The developer took over the role of SIE Worldwide Studios’ president in 2008, before eventually stepping down and taking on the aforementioned head of indies initiative position in 2019, and in the years since indie games have been a big focus for him.
Take one look at his Twitter and you can see that already, with Red Candle Games’ Nine Sols even being in promoted in his bio now that it’s coming to PlayStation. Indies are very important to him, explaining over on the PlayStation Blog that whenever he’d go to an event like E3, he “always went to the indie game area,” and that his role as head of indies initiative was a “dream job” for him.
He also noted that he’s been there since before the original PlayStation came out, joining PlayStation in February 1993, and with such a long time at one company like that, you’d think there’d be all sorts of proud moments for Yoshida. But the one that stood out for him most is actually to do with indie classic Journey. “Among all of these times, one time stood out for me in my memory as something really, really special was when Journey got the Game of the Year Award,” Yoshida said.
“Journey was distributed through PlayStation Network. It was a digital-only, small game. You can finish playing the game within like three hours. But that game…[won] Game of the Year against all these AAA titles, I think for the first time in the industry….the creator Jenova Chen did a talk at the summit, and he talked about a letter he received from a girl who lost her father and she thought about her father and she was able to move on in her life. The whole audience stood up and the whole room was filled with happiness and an amazing feeling that this small game could have such a big impact on people’s lives.”
Yoshida didn’t share what he’ll be doing next just yet, but we can probably safely assume he’ll continue to put indies into the spotlight.
