Shuhei Yoshida has announced that he is leaving PlayStation in January 2025, bringing an end to a 31 year stint at the company that has gone hand-in-hand with the 30 years of PlayStation itself.
Making the announcement in an interview on the PS Blog and PlayStation Podcast, Yoshida-san said:
“I’ve been with PlayStation from the beginning, and this is my 31st year with PlayStation. And when I hit 30 years, I was thinking, hmm, it may be about time for me to move on. You know, the company’s been doing great. I love PS5, I love the games that are coming out on this platform. And we have new generations of management who I respect and admire. And I’m so excited for the future of PlayStation.
“So you know, PlayStation is in really good hands. I thought, okay, this is my time.”
One of the first members of the PlayStation project at Sony in February 1993, Yoshida-san is best known for his stint as President of PlayStation Studios from 2008 to 2019 (then known as SIE Worldwide Studios). In that time he was the steward to the PlayStation 3’s continued revival through the second half of the generation, helped to being indie gaming to PlayStation in a major way through the PlayStation Store, and was one of PlayStation’s main figureheads around the time of the PlayStation 4 launch, affectionately known as Shu throughout the PlayStation fanbase.
He even featured in one of the single defining moments of the run up to the PS4 and Xbox One launch, featuring in a video alongside Adam Boyes as the company dunked on Microsoft’s unpopular planned changes to physical game ownership and digital rights at that time.
Since stepping down from head of PlayStation Studios in 2019, Yoshida-san has had the role of Head of Indies Initiative at PlayStation. This has largely taken him out of the spotlight, though indie games have been on of his biggest passions over the last 15 years.
“One time stood out for me in my memory as something really, really special was when Journey got the Game of the Year Award,” he explained. “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.”
We wish him all the best with whatever he has planned next.
