Former head of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s independent developer initiative, Shuhei Yoshida, had left the company back in January 2025. In recent interview, he revealed that his departure came thanks to his not getting along with the at-the-time PlayStation boss Jim Ryan. As caught by This Week in Video Games, Yoshida, while speaking at the ALT:GAMES festival in Australia, spoke about his time at PlayStation spanning over a decade, and how Ryan initially removed him from heading up first-party development.
“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,” explained Yoshida. “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.’”
The timeline matches up with Ryan’s tenure as CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment between 2019 and 2024. Under his leadership, the company would shake up a number of things, including acquiring development studios like Insomniac Games, Housemarque, Nixxes, Bluepoint Games, Haven Studios, and Bungie. Ryan was also credited for the push Sony had made into releasing its first-party offerings on PC.
“Because I grew up with Jim from the PS1 days… you don’t want to have one of your friends as one of your subordinates,” Yoshida said. On his role of supporting indie game development, Yoshida said that it was “because everyone in the company knew how much I loved indie games. I really enjoyed the role of promoting and evangelizing indie games.”
“I was helping indie publishers and developers at Sony for the last five years, so I feel like I’m continuing to do the same kind of thing, but now I am freelance.”
This has also given him more freedom, and as he goes on to note, he is now “free to show up in any podcast,” and “talk about Nintendo, Xbox, and Steam. And I get to see how Nintendo and Xbox support indies. So it’s very, very cool.”
Back in February 2025, Yoshida had spoken about his time working with indie developers. In an interview, he had also revealed that he “had no choice” in the matter.
“Moving from first-party to indies? Well, I had no choice,” said Yoshida. “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.”
Yoshida also spoke about the challenging nature of the transition of his role from working with first-party AAA studios to supporting indie development on Sony’s platforms.
“That was the bigger change for me personally – moving from first-party to indies – than leaving the company this year,” explained Yoshida. “I’m very lucky that the indie community, the publishers and developers I work closely with, they believed that they could use my help.”