Last year, PlayStation underwent some major changes when longtime former executive Shuhei Yoshida left the company after 31 years. Now, while at the Alt: Games festival in Australia this past weekend, Yoshida opened up a little and talked about what lead to moving on with PlayStation.
According to Yoshida, he claims to have been fired for not agreeing to do certain things.
“I helped Santa Monica to make God of War, Naughty Dog to make Uncharted and The Last of Us, and Sucker Punch to make the beautiful Ghost of Tsushima,” Yoshida reportedly said. “Ghost of Tsushima was one of the last games that I worked on as the president of Worldwide Studios.
“But in 2019, after 11 years leading the first-party development, I was fired from the role. Jim Ryan wanted to remove me from first-party because I didn’t listen to him. He asked to do some ridiculous things, and I said ‘no’.”
Yoshida also talked about his transition to his indie role which he had prior to leaving the company.
“Moving from first-party to indies? Well, I had no choice,” Yoshida explained to VentureBeat in February 2025. “When Jim asked me to do the indie job, the choice was to do that or leave the company. But I felt very strongly about the state of PlayStation and indies. I really wanted to do this. I believed I could do something unique for that purpose.”
Last year, Yoshida also talked about what he would’ve done as the Worldwide Studios President with the company’s push for live-service games. An initiative that has been backtracked. Talking with Kinda Funny, Yoshida joked, “If I was in Hermen [Hulst’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.”