‘You can’t plan a success in this industry’: Former Sony exec Shuhei Yoshida says he would’ve ‘tried to resist’ the company’s ill-fated march towards live service gambles

If you’d ask me, I’d say Sony’s very well and truly felt the sting of Concord’s flop, given it’s slowly been shutting down other live service projects—despite the successes of Helldivers 2, though it’s not as if the company hasn’t endured some hits regarding its handling of the game, to say the very least.

In a recent interview with Kinda Funny Games, Shuhei Yoshida, who recently left PlayStation after a sterling 31 years through a series of high-ranking roles, has stated that he thinks Sony knew the risks—and there were plenty.

“I was responsible for allocating resources to what kind of games [we’d] make. If the company was considering that [live service way], it probably wouldn’t have made sense to stop making great single-player games and to put money into these service games.” Which, Yoshida emphasises, is exactly why they didn’t. “What they did after [Hermen Hulst] took over is the company and Sony allocated a lot more resources [to live service games].

“I don’t think they said to Hermen to stop making single-player games, they said ‘oh yeah, these games are great, just continue doing that, and we’ll give you additional resources to work on these service games and try it.'”

As for the pitfalls? Yoshida doesn’t think anyone at the company was ignorant of the risks: “I’m sure they knew it’s risky. The chance of a game being successful in this hugely competitive genre would be small—however, the company, knowing that risk, gave Hermen those resources and chance to try it … in my mind, [the way they did it] was great, and I’m hoping some of those games become successful.”

In fairness, some of them definitely did—like Helldivers 2, even if it wasn’t made by one of Sony’s internal studios and took eight years to make. “And lucky Helldivers 2 did so well—no-one expected [that], right? You cannot plan a success in this industry. That’s the most fun part.”

Still, Yoshida says that the whole live service diceroll is far from how he would’ve handled it. “Probably, if I was in the position of Hermen, I would’ve tried to resist that direction,” he says, before joking: “Maybe that’s one of the reasons they removed me.”

You’ve got to wonder, then, if Yoshida had stuck around in that role, whether we’d be seeing Sony rush into the live service foibles that left us all collectively groaning and saying enough, enough already. Mind, Marvel Rivals has been a hit, so maybe there’s just enough gold in them rivers to see companies panning well into 2025.