PlayStation stalwart Shuhei Yoshida is leaving the company after over three decades.
Yoshida confirmed the news in a post on the PlayStation Blog and explained he’ll be departing on January 15, 2025.
“I’ve been with PlayStation from the beginning, and this is my 31st year with PlayStation. And when I hit 30 years, I was thinking, hmm, it may be about time for me to move on. You know, the company’s been doing great,” said Yoshida.
“I love PS5, I love the games that are coming out on this platform. And we have new generations of management who I respect and admire. And I’m so excited for the future of PlayStation. So you know, PlayStation is in really good hands. I thought, okay, this is my time.”
It’s a notable departure for Sony, which will be losing one of its most experienced and influential executives. Yoshida currently oversees indie outreach at Sony Interactive and claims the role has enabled him to spend “100 percent of my time helping indies.” Prior to that, he served as president of PlayStation Studios during the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 era.
Yoshida’s PlayStation tenure
He joined Sony in 1993 when the PlayStation project was still in its inception. “I was the first non-technical person to join the team as the company, Sony Corporation at the time, started to plan to bring PlayStation to market,” he explained, noting how the initial team formed by Ken Kutanagi was largely comprised of engineers.
“When I joined [PlayStation], it was still just a department. Ken’s team was doing the development, and there was another team under Sony Music Entertainment Japan making games for Super Nintendo, and that was another small team preparing to make games for PlayStation. So the two teams merged, Ken’s team under Sony and Sato-san’s team under Sony Music Entertainment Japan, to create Sony Computer Entertainment in November 1993,” he continued.
“When the company was established as a joint venture, we held a party and everybody was in one room at the hotel. I remember we had about 80 people total. We were very small.”
Back then, Yoshida was tasked with talking to developers and publishers in Japan to convince them to produce software for PlayStation. He described the role as fun but challenging, largely because there weren’t many people who believed in 3D graphics at the time. Evidently, he found a way to turn heads.
You can hear more from Yoshida ahead of his departure on the PlayStation blog.