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Shu Yoshida has graduated from Sony, but he is not retired. Rather, he is running a new indie games consulting company dubbed YOSP Inc.
Yoshida’s appetite to do more in gaming shows just how much he loves indie game developers. He won a Lifetime Achievement Awards at Gamescom Latam 2025, where I did a fireside chat with him in front of a big crowd of admirers.
Yoshida just completed 38 years at Sony, including 31 years at PlayStation, and he completed his last day at the big Japanese company’s gaming division on January 15.
While he’s leaving an illustrious career in the PlayStation business, Yoshida told me in an interview and the crowd at Gamescom Latam that he’s not done with gaming. He still plans on working with indie game makers, which was his final assignment at Sony Interactive Entertainment. He joined Sony in 1986, right out of college, and went to work in corporate strategy to review budgets and look for new businesses for Sony.
At the time, Ken Kutaragi, seeking revenge against Nintendo after it reneged on an agreement to work with Sony on a game console, pitched and won approval for creating the Sony PlayStation. Yoshida didn’t believe Kutaragi could pull off his plan to do workstation-level 3D graphics on a $500 game console. But his former boss urged Yoshida to join, and he took the plunge into the unknown. Yoshida became one of the first 80 people working on the PlayStation.
The system debuted in December 1994 in Japan and in 1995 in the U.S. It turned out to be a huge hit, and Yoshida had to create a deck to impress Kutaragi’s bosses. Some viewed the PlayStation as a “toy” that would tarnish the Sony brand. Yoshida pitched the PlayStation as the “world’s first virtual reality system.” Once Sony moved forward, Yoshida had to convince Japanese game developers and publishers to make games for the system.
As the PlayStation succeeded, Yoshida climbed up the ranks, moving to the U.S. and becoming a vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment. He became president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios in 2008, after Phil Harrison left to run Atari. In 2019, as Jim Ryan became the head of the PlayStation business, Yoshida stepped down from that role and became head of PlayStation Indies in 2019. Of that move, he said he had no choice. It was taking that indie job or leave the company. In 2023, he received a BAFTA Fellowship for his work in games.
Among the titles he worked on were Gran Turismo, The Legend of Dragoon, Ape Escape, Crash Bandicoot, Crash Team Racing and Spyro 2: Ripto’s Range. He oversaw development on best-selling franchises including God of War, Uncharted and The Last of Us. He also became a popular spokesman for Sony, often leading the company’s responses to gamers on social media.
I caught up with Yoshida at the Dice Summit this week in Las Vegas and once again at Gamescom Latam. We talked about those memories and more.
The Gamescom Latam Big Festival 2025 awards in Sao Paulo, Brazil, started with the lifetime achievement award for Shu Yoshida, who championed indies at Sony’s PlayStation division during his decades of work at the company.
Rodrigo Terra, CEO of Abram Games, the Brazilian game association, presented the award to Yoshida, who will do a fireside chat with me at Gamescom Latam on Thursday evening in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Shu Yoshida just won the lifetime achievement award here at Gamescom Latam yesterday, so congratulations to Shu for that. He also won a similar award from BAFTA. He’s been in this business forever. He spent 31 years at PlayStation, and 38 years altogether at Sony. He joined in 1986, and he was employee number 32 on what was at the time an 80-person PlayStation team. He helped launch the original PlayStation, the PS2, PS3, PS4. He ultimately rose to lead the Worldwide Studios in charge of franchises like Uncharted and The Last of Us. He ended his time there focused on indie games.
Shu just retired from Sony at the end of last year. Now he can talk a bit more.
Shuhei Yoshida: I left Sony, but I’m not retired.
GamesBeat: You started a new gig. What are you doing now?
Yoshida: I started my own company, YOSP Inc. I want to help indie publishers and developers that I’ve known for a long time. I’m working with younger people who are talented and passionate about games to develop really high-quality, creative games. I’m having a lot of fun working with these companies now.
GamesBeat: One of the good things about Shu leaving Sony is he’s been able to do a lot more interviews lately. I did one with him. It got passed around quite a bit. Were there some moments you talked about in your interviews that you had never talked about before, that also got a lot of attention? What were the stories that people liked hearing about you?
Yoshida: The interview you did with me, that was received very well. What did we talk about?
GamesBeat: One interesting thing about you and your long career is that you were very active on social media. People really liked you. A lot of game executives seem to shy away from interacting with fans, but you dove into it.
Yoshida: I kind of represented PlayStation when I was with the company. I’m very active on X, the former Twitter. I have lots of followers. Every time PlayStation, as a company, does something good, like release a new great game or new hardware, make a big announcement, people come to my channel and say, “Shu, you’re doing a great job.” Even if I had nothing to do with that part of the company. I always get credit I don’t deserve. Of course, when there was something bad about PlayStation I’d get, “Shu, you suck.” But luckily, more often than not PlayStation was doing something right.
Every day, even today, when I wake up I look at my X account and people I don’t know tell me I’m doing great. Think about that. If every morning, someone you don’t know tells you you’re doing great, that’s a pretty happy life. I’m living a great life right now thanks to my interactions with people on the internet.
GamesBeat: I think you’re being a bit overly humble when you say you had nothing to do with some of these games. We mentioned Uncharted and The Last of Us, but other things that happened on your watch include Gran Turismo, The Legend of Dragoon, Ape Escape, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro II. Is there any game you really enjoyed working on the most?
Yoshida: During the PlayStation days, I was a producer. I was very hands-on with game development. The game where I was most involved in the creative aspect was Ape Escape. Do you all know Ape Escape? Oh, thank you. It’s an action platformer game, like Mario, but you catch monkeys. That was a lot of fun. When we started developing the game, our goal was to create a 3D action platformer like Mario 64, an amazing game of that generation. But when we learned that the PlayStation hardware team was preparing for the launch of a new controller with two analog sticks, the Dual Shock controller, we decided to make this game only playable with the new controller. We wanted to come up with game mechanics that used two analog sticks very well. We prototyped lots of actions, like when you rotate the right analog stick, you could move a propeller and fly. It was a lot of fun to do.
GamesBeat: I forgot to mention God of War as well. That was a small game.
Yoshida: On PlayStation 2 I was responsible for development in the United States. Santa Monica Studios was one of the studios I was overseeing. When they made God of War, that was the very first first-party game from PlayStation to win game of the year awards from industry events like the DICE Summit or GDC. We were all very proud.
During the original PlayStation days, you might not know this, but Japan was the home of our game development. Lots of great games came out of Japan. Those Japanese companies were respected globally for the quality of their games. When I moved from Japan to the U.S. for the PS2, I thought, “All right, I’m going to bring Japanese game development to the U.S.” But when I landed in the U.S., I quickly realized how open the development community in the U.S. was. At places like GDC, game developers gathered together and shared knowledge. They learned from each other.
Quickly, just after a couple of years, I stopped looking at games from Japan. The quality of game development in the U.S. was going up so quickly. When we released God of War, the 3D action-adventure genre in the past was known for games developed in Japan, but it was so well-done that development teams in Japan asked, “How did you make this game?” That was a very proud moment for me, working with a U.S. team to make games that Japanese developers respected.
GamesBeat: Some people are probably wondering how you got to be a gamer. There’s a little-known story about your childhood and how you made games with pencil and paper.
Yoshida: When I was a child, there was no such thing as console gaming. During my school days, I created a game using a pencil. I carved the edge of the pencil, because it had six faces, with numbers from one to six. Then I prepared two pencils like that and created a chart on paper, like a matrix. The pencils acted like two dice. When you threw the pencils, you got a combination of numbers, like one and six or three and four. You could put any rules inside that matrix. For example, I made a baseball game. When you’d throw one and one it was a home run, something like that. I made many different kinds of games like that and let my school friends play them with me.
The one game I made in those days that I was really proud of–the desks we had at school were made of wood, with a thick plate of wood on top. I carved a baseball diamond into the surface of my desk and used a pachinko ball and a pencil. We’d sit on opposite sides of the desk. One person would throw the pachinko ball and the other would try to hit it with the pencil. There were holes on the surface – this one is a home run, this is an out, this is a double play. That was a very popular game among my friends. But eventually I was called to the principal’s office to apologize. Luckily they didn’t report that to my parents.
GamesBeat: Tell me how you met Ken Kutaragi, the father of the PlayStation.
Yoshida: I was working at Sony Corporation. At the time Sony was an electronics company making the Walkman, TVs, VCRs and so on. I was working in the PC department. Sony was developing a notebook computer for Apple. The very first Powerbook was designed by Sony. But one time I was called by my former boss to meet with Ken Kutaragi. Ken said, “We’re developing a video game system with the power of a workstation.” At the time Silicon Graphics workstations were in the $50,000 to $100,000 range. You used them to create pre-rendered 3D graphics. He said we were going to sell this game machine for $500. I said, “That’s amazing,” but I totally didn’t believe him.
I went back to the person who recommended me to meet with Kutaragi, and I said, “I think this guy is a liar.” But that person said, “No, I trust what Ken is doing.” So I asked if I could join Ken’s team. That’s how I came to join the PlayStation team, long before the PlayStation was launched.
GamesBeat: We’re going to jump around a bit. You’ve engaged with Brazilian game developers before. You met the folks who founded Arvore.
Yoshida: One thing I had lots of fun doing during the PlayStation 4 generation was that I got involved in the development of the PlayStation VR system, the first one. That idea actually came from Santa Monica Studios, the God of War team. They created a handmade viewer and attached it to a PS3 dev kit. It used the Move controller. It was a handmade VR system. They customized a God of War game on PS3. One of the developers put that handmade headset on my head and I was in the world of God of War. I looked down and I was Kratos. It was an amazing experience. If that was possible with the PS3, we thought that with the PS4, we could probably develop it into a consumer product. That was where the inspiration came from. I was heavily involved in the development of the actual hardware.
When we were working on PSVR and released the hardware, there was a brilliant game called Pixel Ripped 1989. That game was developed here in Brazil by Arvore. The game used, in my mind, the best use of the PSVR system. You were an elementary school student, and in class you wanted to play your portable game system, like a Game Boy. There’s a game inside the game. But you have to play the game while the teacher isn’t looking at you. You have to check on what the teacher is looking at and play the game successfully on the portable you have. The PSVR system has the ability to track the Dual Shock controller. When you’re holding the Dual Shock like this, you really feel like you’re holding that portable game system inside the virtual world. I became a huge fan of that game and met the developer, Ana Ribeiro, the creator of the game. We became friends. That’s how I met a Brazilian developer for the first time.
GamesBeat: You made a transition in your career, moving from being in charge of all the studios to being in charge of indies. What was that like for you?
Yoshida: It was 2019. Jim Ryan, at the time, was CEO of the company. He asked me to do something about supporting indies. I don’t know if you recall, but in 2019 PlayStation was criticized by media people and industry people, who said that PlayStation wasn’t supporting indie developers enough. PlayStation was known as a big supporter of indie games around the launch of PS4, and we had great indie games available on PS4, but toward the end of the generation somehow the company’s attention shifted more to supporting big games and first-party games. I was responsible for developing first-party games, so I was getting a lot of support from the company, but I was concerned about the seeming lack of support for indie developers.
To me, it’s not only that I was a big fan of indie games, but I truly believe that indie developers will create the future. They bring innovation to the industry. A great company like PlayStation with such a large platform in the industry should be leading support for creativity in that part of the industry. But it looked like we weren’t doing enough. When Jim Ryan asked me to do something, I said I would do my best to advocate for the importance of indie games inside and outside the company. I worked with our third-party teams to identify great games coming out and tried to promote them in social channels and so on. For the last five years of my work at PlayStation, I was looking at indie games, identifying great games and promoting them so that lots of people would try them.
GamesBeat: How did you develop your personal taste around games and use your intuition to decide what games to greenlight and put a lot of money behind?
Yoshida: When I was responsible for the first-party studios, of course we had some popular IP like God of War and Uncharted. People wanted to play more of those games. Their studios had ideas to advance those franchises, and I supported the creation of those sequels. But I always wanted to balance our work on those existing franchises and our investment in new IP. In my mind, working on new IP is the best chance, the best opportunity for a team to come up with innovative ideas. I always wanted to spend half of my budget on new IP development. As far as what new games to support, it was partly instinct and partly listening to the developers to see how much thought they had put into coming up with these ideas.
GamesBeat: You’ve always been a pretty optimistic person, but the game industry has had a tough time in the last few years. There have been a lot of layoffs, a lot of studios closing. People talk about an indie apocalypse, but it also seems to be affecting triple-A games. Everything has been affected in some way. How do you stay optimistic?
Yoshida: Five years ago, when COVID happened, everyone in the world had to stay at home. They had to spend a lot of time at home. Naturally they spent a lot of time playing games. The video game industry got a huge benefit from that situation. The industry grew like crazy. Many companies, especially large companies, believed that trend would continue. Industry analysts were projecting that crazy growth would continue. Naturally, management people invested a lot of money, and a lot of money came in from outside the industry. The last couple of years of adjustment, with all these cancellations and layoffs, is the punishment for that kind of thinking from management.
When it comes to keeping an optimistic view, when you look at the growth of the industry, it’s been tapering off for a couple of years. But if you take out these anomalies and plot it out, the industry is still growing steadily. I have a strong theory that video games take advantage of any new technological advancement. When new technology comes along, the first thing people do with it is make games. Developers are quick to take advantage and experiment with new technology. Entertainment always needs fresh new ideas. Otherwise people get bored and move on.
Luckily, because of this constant development of new technologies, video games always have fresh opportunities to create new experiences, or to reduce the cost of development, the cost of entry into the industry. Take digital distribution. That’s the biggest change in the last 30 years for the industry. Digital distribution democratized the industry. In the past, before digital, you had to have capital to become a publisher. You had to spend a lot of money creating physical inventory. You had to sell to distributors and retailers. You needed a lot of organization to be able to do that.
Now, a kid in Africa can just download Unity for free, as long as they have a PC, and start making games. If they make a great game, they can publish it on Steam or whatever distribution platform – PlayStation Network, Xbox Live – and sell their game globally. That’s the biggest change, the biggest opportunity. More and more creative minds are entering the industry as game developers. In this region as well, I was here three years ago for the BIG festival. I met with many developers and played their games on the show floor. Three years later, the games I was able to play here, the games I saw from developers–I took 14 meetings today. The quality has clearly increased. I’m super optimistic for the future of this industry, as long as we continue to create new technology and developers continue to take advantage of it.
GamesBeat: How did you think about deciding to leave Sony and PlayStation?
Yoshida: I was very happy managing the first-party studios. You may know that we had fantastic, creative, passionate teams like Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Guerrilla Games, Media Molecule, or Japan Studios. It was so much fun working with these teams, so inspiring and so rewarding. The games these teams made were played by millions of people globally. We were able to see how much positive impact we had on the lives of people. Some of you might have grown up playing the games we developed. It was such a rewarding job.
When Jim Ryan asked me to do something about indies, I wasn’t thinking that I would do anything other than game development for PlayStation. But because of the situation that I explained, I thought that I had to do something before I left PlayStation. I really cared about how PlayStation supported indie games. Five years ago, I set a goal to make my role as an advocate for indie games at PlayStation obsolete. If I did a good job working with all the teams at PlayStation to support indies and set up resources to support them, I wouldn’t need a person like me to keep saying that this was important. Everyone at the company would understand.
Last year, after those five years, I felt like the company was on a good trajectory. They have good resources and plans to keep supporting indies. My mission was accomplished. At the same time, Jim Ryan, who set up my role, left the company before I did. I became almost the last of the management group from the very first generation of PlayStation. Luckily, the company picked great people as the new generation of leaders for PlayStation. They’re much younger than our generation. They’ll bring fresh ideas for the company. I felt like my time at PlayStation was finishing. That’s how I decided to leave.
GamesBeat: From looking at so many indie games, what trends do you feel good about that are happening in the game industry? What are some things you’re excited about for the future?
Yoshida: At PlayStation there’s an initiative called the China Hero Project, the India Hero Project, and now the MENA Hero Project, the Middle East and North Africa. PlayStation is investing in developers in these regions to help them become console game developers. I was part of this initiative. I spent time visiting India for a couple of years, meeting with Indian developers. I really like when I see games coming from these regions. Not just high-quality games, but developers taking advantage of their heritage, their culture and mythology, their music, and even social issues in those regions. They’re creating unique games with authentic subjects, the kind of games that only the developers in that region can create.
So many games are being developed worldwide because of the democratization I talked about. It’s hard to compete. Some of you might be developers. You must be feeling the same. Even if you make a great game, it’s hard to get your game to be known by people, because so many games are released every week. But if you rely on something you believe that you know better than anyone else in the world, if you’re the most knowledgeable about that subject, that’s a chance for your game to stand out. There are always people with money, publishers and investors, looking for new ideas and new games to scout. I understand there are many publishing scouts here at Gamescom Latam trying to find new games. They’re always looking for new ideas, something they haven’t seen before. When I see games like that from India, from Brazil, that really excites me.
GamesBeat: Could you talk about some of the most memorable moments from your long career?
Yoshida: I always say that the game I’m most proud of was Journey. It was a small game made by a small team, right out of school in Los Angeles. Lots of people who played that game cried at the end. It’s a metaphor for human life. When I played it, toward the end I was remembering my grandmother, who had passed away a few years before. Jenova Chen, the creator of the game–it won lots of awards. He did a speech at the DICE Summit that year, where he read a letter from a girl who had lost her father. She talked about how playing the game helped her to deal with the sadness of losing her father, remembering his life and being able to overcome that sadness. Knowing that a small game could have a huge impact on the lives of people like that, a game you could play in just four hours–I felt the impact a game could have on human life was so meaningful. I was so proud to be part of that development process.
GamesBeat: It’s heartening to see that Jenova and thatgamecompany are trying to give back to the industry. They just announced this week that they wanted to do some game jams to surface narrative games with emotional storytelling. They’re going to help fund these games from indie developers.
Yoshida: Jenova is a fantastic person. They made a lot of money from their game Sky. It’s great to see that. You were in the room for Jenova’s speech at DICE, weren’t you?
GamesBeat: Yeah, I’ve talked to Jenova a lot of times. I remember one of the things he talked about was that they had this successful game, but the company still wasn’t financially viable. They had to find another way out, go down a different path. But fortunately that led to Sky.
Question: At E3 2013 there were big repercussions related to a video where Mr. Yoshida demonstrated the process of borrowing a PS4 game from a friend. Many considered this moment Sony’s comeback to a leadership position in the market. It set the company up as the winner in that generation, even before it was launched. How did Sony see that moment, which also highlighted the weak points of the competition?
Yoshida: I can answer the last part first. It was great to have a good competitor who let us win. We were just talking about our plans. People thought we were brilliant.
Question: Now that you’ve been working with indie studios a lot, what lessons do you think triple-A studios still have to learn from indies?
Yoshida: Big studios–I worked with larger studios during my first-party development days. They’re big fans of indie games. Indies try new ideas. They come up with new game mechanics and even invent new genres of games. Triple-A studio people are game fans as well. They always play indie games and get inspiration from younger creative developers. They’re learning, and that will continue.
The size of triple-A development is becoming even bigger now. Companies have to make safe bets in terms of genres and subject matter. They have to do sequels, things like that. But they want to reinvent their franchises inside that kind of development. Often the source of their inspiration comes from indie developers.
Question: How does it feel for you to see franchises that you gave birth to, that you saw being created, have so much impact now on the game industry?
Yoshida: How does it feel? It feels amazing. I always feel proud of the developers who made these franchises, who pushed their franchises to new heights. I came up as a producer in studio management. I can’t program or draw art or design games. I’ve always had a high respect for the people who can do that. Every time younger developers push to the next stage for these franchises and get a great reaction from their audience, that makes me proud of them.
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