Shuhei Yoshida had been the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios for over a decade when he was suddenly replaced in 2019 by Guerrilla Games studio head Hermen Hulst. It was one of a number of surprising shakeups at PlayStation as Jim Ryan took charge ahead of the launch of the PS5. Speaking at Australia’s 2026 ALT: Games festival over the weekend, Yoshida shed some more light on the nature of his demotion and his final years at Sony.
“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,” he said in a speech at the event, This Week In Video Games reports. “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 added with a smile and to reported laughter in the room. “He asked to do some ridiculous things, and I said ‘No.’”
While Yoshida didn’t go into further detail on the nature of their disagreements, Ryan’s time as CEO at PlayStation saw the console maker pursue big acquisitions and large investments in live-service games. Many of the studios purchased have been closed or faced layoffs, and many of the live-service games have been canceled or failed at launch.
The most infamous example of this strategy, the hero shooter Concord, was so bad that it was quickly “unreleased,” and the studio behind it, Firewalk, shuttered just a couple of years after being bought. Former Chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden departed the company in 2019, just prior to Yoshida’s demotion, with no real explanation at the time. He later insinuated he was also a casualty of the new live-service push.
“To be honest, you know, the company was making some strategic decisions about where they want to take the platform in the future with a heavy emphasis on games as a service, live-service gaming, subscription formulas, recurring revenue, whatnot, and that was kind of not my wheelhouse,” Layden said in a podcast interview last year.
Unlike Layden, Yoshida stayed on at Sony for the first half of the PS5 generation to help support indie game development on the platform. A familiar face at gaming conventions, scouting for promising projects and the small teams behind them, Yoshida said that since his official retirement in 2025, he’s essentially doing the same work “evangelizing indie games” as he was in his final years at Sony, just with a chance to consult on Nintendo and Xbox’s platforms as well.
