Sony Japan Studio Was Closed As PlayStation Bosses Didn’t Want AA Games, Says Shuhei Yoshida

Ex-Sony Worldwide Studios boss and indie lead, Shuhei Yoshida, has said that the SIE Studio Japan closed its doors as, despite doing a great job on the AA game front, management didn’t want to continue pumping out this type of product.

Speaking with AV Watch, Yoshida-san revealed that Sony revealed that he was at the forefront of first-party efforts, and as such was tasked with pushing games that were powerful enough to sell the hardware. However, while Japan Studio were solid at making double-A titles, it wasn’t what Sony were looking for overall.

I was in charge of the first party, so I was asked to make a game that was powerful enough to sell hardware. When you make something like that, the company pushes you a lot. The company wanted such things, and while we had to make them, the scale of development and the sales required were getting bigger and bigger.

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At that time, the JAPAN studio was a team that was good at making AA, and it was a studio. In that case, it probably doesn’t match what the company and first party are looking for.

Since leaving Sony earlier this year, Yoshida-san has been very forthcoming on various topics during numerous interviews. Back in February, Yoshida told the Sacred Symbols+ podcast that Sony was not forcing its studios to develop live service products, despite the format holder in recent years having made a big push into this territory (this hasn’t gone exactly to play yet, with the Last of Us’ multiplayer spinoff cancelled and Concord flopping).

In a separate interview with VentureBeat, the former Sony executive touched base on the as-yet unannounced PlayStation 6, stating it ‘feels right‘ if the console were to launch in 2028.

[Source – AV Watch via Insider Gaming]