Former SIE Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has revealed why FromSoftware went with Bandai Namco as its publisher for Dark Souls after the release of Demon’s Souls by Sony. In an interview with the Sacred Symbols podcast (via VGC), he revealed that FromSoftware didn’t like how the latter was handled by Sony.
According to Yoshida, Sony had expressed an interest in working with FromSoftware on a sequel to Demon’s Souls. The developer chose to instead go with Bandai Namco for the game, which would eventually become Dark Souls.
“FromSoftware was already working on the sequel, but they were so disappointed with how PlayStation treated them. We wanted to work with them again but they passed on it,” said Yoshida, who went on to speak fondly about series director Hidetaka Miyazaki.
“We have huge respect for Miyazaki, and we were able to work with them again,” Yoshida said. “Bloodborne is one of his best games.”
In previous interviews, he admitted that he thought that the game would be bad based on the time he spent with a pre-release build of Demon’s Souls.
“For my personal experience with Demon’s Souls, when it was close to final, I spent close to two hours playing it and after two hours I was still standing at the beginning at the game,” said Yoshida in a 2012 interview with Game Informer. “I said: ‘This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.’ So I put it aside.”
He spoke about the fact that Atlus and Bandai Namco were able to help make Demon’s Souls a successful release even outside of Japan, where the title was published by Sony.
“Luckily, third-party publishers, Atlus in North America and Namco in Europe [stepped in], and it really became a great hit outside of Japan,” he said at the time. “We definitely dropped the ball from a publishing standpoint, including the studio management side. We were not able to see the value of the product we were making.”
Yoshida has revealed many details about his time with Sony since leaving the company last month. In the same interview, he also spoke about the death of Japan Studio being caused by the market for smaller-scale AA titles disappearing.
“Most of the IPs that Japan Studio had were in that smaller double-A sized group, and the market became really difficult for these kinds of games,” said Yoshida. “For example, after Gravity Rush 2, [director Keiichiro Toyama] tried to come up with a new concept, but we were not able to greenlight any of his new concepts, even though they were really interesting.”
He also spoke about how he was moved from heading first-party studios to working with indie developers to help them bring their games to Sony’s console. “Well, I had no choice,” said Yoshida of the time, with his only other option being to leave the company.
Yoshida left PlayStation back in January after having spent 31 years with the company. He has been credited as an executive producer on titles like Ape Escape, The Legend of Dragoon, and Gran Turismo.
