Asked for his opinion on his former employer’s current development direction, former PlayStation President Shuhei Yoshida says that if he were still in charge of the gaming giant, he would have put up a much more definitive resistance against Sony’s ill-fated obsession with live-service titles.
As anyone who has caught even the faintest whisper of video game discourse in recent years can attest, Sony’s track record with the concept of a constantly updating, massively multiplayer game has been far, far less than impressive.
In 2022, the company announced their intention to launch a total of 12 live service games by the end of their fiscal year 2025. However, this outlook would later be cut down to just six, with related entries in the The Last of Us, Marvel’s Spider-Man and Twisted Metal franchises being among the handful that were given the proverbial axe.
Fast forward to the start of this year, and not only have two of these six games, the hero shooter disaster known as Concord and the ‘Splatoon at home’ Foamstars, already been shut down, but Sony has also already cancelled another pair of in-development live-service titles, including one centered on the God of War universe.
Given the overall slapstick nature of the company’s attempts to capitalize on the live-service model, it comes as little surprise that Kinda Funny Games host Greg Miller would use a recent opportunity to speak with Yoshida to press him for his thoughts on PlayStation’s less-than-stellar approach to their desired goals.
Hosting the original PS1 dev team member on January 15th for his first interview since officially retiring from the company in November 2024, Miller would at one point raise the topic of Sony’s aforementioned ‘all-in’ bet on live-service games and inquire to Yoshida, “with your eyes on the entire industry, did it make sense to you?”
[Time Stamp: 01:11:03]
In turn, the former PlayStation boss asserted, “For me, I was managing this budget, so I was responsible for allocating money to what kinds of games to make. If the company was considering [going] that way, it wouldn’t have made sense to stop making another God of War or single-player game, and put all the money into live service games.”
But in offering a qualification to his observation, he then recalled, “However, what they did after I left and Hermen [Hulst] took over is the company, Sony, gave us a lot more resources.”
“I don’t think they told Hermen to stop making single-player games,” said Yoshida. They said ‘Oh yeah, these games are great, just continue doing that, and we’ll give you additional resources to work on these live service games and try it’.
“I’m sure they knew it’s risky,” he continued. “The chance of a game being successful in this hugely competitive genre would be small. However, the company, knowing that risk, gave Hermen the resources and chance to try it. I think that’s the way they did it. So, in my mind, that’s great, and hopefully some games will become successful.”
Further sharing his optimism towards the situation, Yoshida pointed to the success of Helldivers 2 and exclaimed, “Nobody expected that. So you cannot plan a success in this industry. That’s the most fun part of this business!”
But despite his optimism towards PlayStation’s live-service ambitions, the PlayStation legend closed out his thoughts on the topic by playfully noting that he would have had an admittedly different approach to such a push.
“I hope that this strategy will work in the end,” he concluded. “If I was in the Hermen’s position, probably I would’ve tried to resist that direction. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they removed me from the first-party!”
More About:Video Game News
