The Sony veteran has been with PlayStation from the start and played a major role in its evolution.
Sony has announced that Shuhei Yoshida, one of the first members of the PlayStation team and a major figure in the platform’s history, is to retire after 38 years with the company, 31 of which were spent on PlayStation. Yoshida joined Sony in 1986 and would find his first role with PlayStation in 1993, when he became responsible for third party licensing, before going on to act as a producer on major titles like Gran Turismo and a supervisor on countless others.
But Yoshida’s real legacy for PlayStation is the senior roles he’s held since the early 2000s, first as vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, then senior vice president of SCE Worldwide Studios USA—and from 2008, president of SCE Worldwide Studios. Over this time Sony enjoyed the colossal success of the PlayStation 2 and dominated the console market for a spell, before the leaner times of PlayStation 3. But it was with PlayStation 4 that Yoshida became a more public-facing figure for the brand.
The highlight? It has to be PlayStation’s response to the disastrous reveal of Xbox One in 2013. Microsoft had made a mess of the console’s announcement, and people especially hated that Xbox One would stop you sharing your physical games with friends. Sony’s savage response to this was 21 seconds long, and arguably the greatest gaming roast of all time.
Yoshida stepped down as president of SIE Worldwide Studios in 2019, and has since then focused on nurturing smaller titles for the platform as the head of Indies Initiative. To mark his departure he’s been interviewed on the PlayStation podcast, and is charming as ever. « It’s like announcing the launch date of a new game », chuckles Yoshida, « [something] I haven’t done for a long time.
