A PlayStation veteran who oversaw some of Sony's biggest franchises says he was fired for refusing to do "ridiculous things" requested by then-CEO Jim Ryan during a 2019 executive shakeup.
Shuhei Yoshida, who led Sony's Worldwide Studios for 11 years and helped shepherd titles including God of War, Uncharted, The Last of Us, and Ghost of Tsushima, revealed at Australia's ALT: Games festival that his departure from first-party leadership wasn't voluntary.
"In 2019, after 11 years leading the first-party development, I was fired from the role,"
Yoshida told attendees. "Jim Ryan wanted to remove me from first-party because I didn't listen to him." The executive said Ryan had asked him "to do some ridiculous things," prompting his refusal and subsequent removal from overseeing PlayStation's internal studios like Naughty Dog, Santa Monica Studio, Sucker Punch Productions, Guerrilla Games and Insomniac.
Yoshida made the comments during a Sunday panel at the Australian gaming event, as reported by This Week in Video Games.
Yoshida didn't specify what exactly Ryan had requested, but described delivering his response with a smile that reportedly drew laughter from the audience. His demotion came as part of broader leadership changes when Ryan took charge ahead of the PS5 launch in 2020.
Ryan replaced Yoshida with Guerrilla Games studio head Hermen Hulst as president of Worldwide Studios in November 2019. Yoshida was shifted to lead PlayStation's indie developer initiatives instead, a move he previously characterized as having "no choice" about when speaking to VentureBeat last year.
"I had no choice,"
Yoshida explained in February 2025. "When Jim asked me to do the indie job, the choice was to do that or leave the company."
The timing matches PlayStation's pivot toward live-service games and major studio acquisitions under Ryan's leadership between 2019 and his departure in March 2024. That period saw Sony purchase developers including Insomniac Games (Spider-Man), Housemarque (Returnal), Bungie (Destiny) and Bluepoint Games (Demon's Souls remake), while also pushing heavily into games-as-a-service development.
Yoshida suggested last year that if he'd remained in charge of first-party studios, he would have resisted that live-service direction.
"If I was in Hermen [Hulst's] position, probably I would've tried to resist that direction, maybe that's one of the reasons they removed me from the first-party,"
he told Kinda Funny.
Despite being pushed out of his leadership role in 2019, Yoshida remained at Sony until January 2025 when he departed after 31 years with the company. He now runs his own indie game consulting firm Yosp Inc., which allows him to work across platforms including Nintendo and Xbox, something he couldn't do while at PlayStation.
"I'm free to show up in any podcast,"
Yoshida said. "Now I can talk about Nintendo, Xbox, Steam."
