Sony Computer Entertainmeent Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida is is never afraid to show his enthusiasm and passion for gaming, and he talked about some of the gaming trends that most excite him.
'If the big companies dictate what games can be created, I don't think that will advance the industry.' -Shihei Yoshida
🙄 same guy who said 80$ is a steal lol and according to him M$ shouldnt put good on a services🤣 wtf
Talks about "innovation" while all his previous company is focused on is GaaS and Remasters. Smh.
This guy is a walking contradiction.
This makes no sense at all.
What does his PREVIOUS company have to do with him and his statement??
Did he have a say on what they are doing? Could of sworn that was Jim Ryan’s fault?
Yet he was In charge and led the PlayStation to overtake xbox
Console VR was birthed because if him he pushed the whole psvr project if that isn't innovative then what is.
Doesn't matter how many alts you use to try and constuct ab alt narrative shu is highly respected in the industry and has done as much for gaming as some of the best names in the industry
@Profchaos
I don´t care what he did in the past.
Sony didn´t cared for him either as he was forced to accept a role as CEO of Indie games or get out! After everything he done for the company.
https://www.eurogamer.net/f...
I been seeing LOTS of innovative day one games on Gamepass (Including Clair Obscur) and all I´ve been seeing for Playstation first party @Full Priced is mostly (but not only) GaaS and Remasters. Deny all you want, that´s the truth.
Subscription services are absolutely awful. They have essentially destroyed the movie industry and unfortunately gaming may be next.
In the long term you will end up needing 10 different subscriptions and the prices will keep going up while the quality keeps going down.
Subscription services have f***ed the movie industry and it's work force, caused massive studio buyups by companies like Disney consolidating huge parts of the industry under one roof and have creatively sterilised the IP's they've gobbled up. The same thing is happening to gaming, MS being the main greedy piggy.
Well… if you’re talking about the US movie industry, then I couldn’t agreed with you more.
But the movie industry isn’t just the US. For some other countries, it’s been considered good. Like where i am, the movie industry here used to be terrible, now it’s a bit less terrible. Mostly this is because in the past movies only can make money mostly on it’s cinema run, but now after the cinema run they can get some funds from the subscription services. Which helps significantly.
But these movies mostly suck due to the low budgets and general lack of talent lol
I get what he's saying, but I don’t think we need subscription services to see a lot of the problems he's pointing out. All we really have to do is look at the gaming industry over the last two console generations. Even without subscriptions, the big AAA publishers have already been moving in a direction where almost every game feels like it's built from the same template. It’s all about streamlined, safe design choices that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience. At this point, you could probably ask an AI to make a AAA game from a certain publisher and it would spit out something pretty close to what they’re actually making.
Now, about the whole “walled garden” thing... that’s not some future problem, it’s already here. Consoles have always worked like that. Their entire business model is based on controlling what gets released on their platforms. Sure, maybe they’re not as locked down as the extreme examples people bring up, but the end result is similar. If you’re not making the kind of game the platform holder wants, you’re probably not getting through the door. We’ve seen it with Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, even Valve does this in its own way with Steam. So yeah, the issue isn’t new or exclusive to subscription services.
Would a subscription-only future make that problem worse? Sure, it definitely could. But I don’t think we’re heading in that direction anytime soon. Unless physical hardware truly becomes a thing of the past and everyone switches to streaming games, I just don’t see subscriptions becoming the dominant model. They’ll stick around as an option, but I doubt they’ll take over completely.
Now, what will take over completely is digital media, and that’s a whole different issue that’s going to hit us a lot sooner. PC and mobile are already basically 100% digital, and that makes up around 70% of the gaming market. The remaining 30% is consoles, and even there we’re seeing the shift. Sony’s removing the disc drive from boxed consoles, Nintendo is releasing just one super expensive 64GB cartridge for their new system, which means almost all third-party publishers will end up going digital and Microsoft is mostly digital already. You either get a digital-only or a physical box with disc that only acts as a activation key. So yeah, that future’s already knocking on the door and the damage will be enormous.
Right, because then you can’t sell individual games at $80, which is an incredible value for the consumer!
I find this statement quite telling. Apparently a certain fan base wasn't buying games at $60 or $70 dollars either. That's why the Gamepass model exists with day and date. What was the excuse then?
We as gamers want it all but don't want to pay for anything. Well, I take that back. A good chunk of them. You don't have to buy a game at $80. Wait for to go down in price. Most gamers have a massive backlog. Play those games until the one you wants drops and n price. Simple
I never buy any games at full price, it’s up to the consumer to wait for a price cut.
Generally I don’t buy above $10, normally around $5. So don’t agree with 80 70 60? Just wait a bit
Totally fair if that approach works for you, but the flip side is that some dev studios do rely on full-price sales to stay afloat—especially smaller or AA teams. The ‘just wait for a sale’ mindset can really hurt games that aren’t backed by massive budgets or publishers.
It’s also kind of a bummer to finally see a game release you’ve been hyped for, only to feel like you have to wait another year or two just to get a decent discount.
That said, I think the deeper issue is with bloated dev budgets. It’s wild seeing games like First Berserker or Expedition 33 launching at $50 while still managing to look great and make a profit. Meanwhile, some AAA studios say $70 isn’t enough to break even. That raises real questions about where the money’s going and whether the pricing problem is actually a budgeting problem.
To me, it depends on who made it and who will profit.
I bought No Man's Sky back in 2016. They gave me all updates, PSVR,PS5, and PSVR2 versions all for free.
That makes it worth every dollar I spent. Same with Balatro, Stardew Valley, Dave the Diver etc.
Yeah weird it's like a certain fan base that doesn't buy ANY games and their sales cratered that was why prices has gone up to $80...... hmmm...... they've the same one that has tried to buy up the industry and now has to release games on competing platforms to be viable now...... but you know the studio/company slipped my mind
You have a point on the bloated development budgets.
I mean look at black myth wukong’s $80m budget vs the $150-200m (possibly more) budget of concord.
Shuhei Yoshida offers his take on the recent industry implosion and ponders whether there's light at the end of the tunnel.
Greed crippled the game industry and other things I won’t go into.
Ironically, so did tech advancements.
New tech creates pressure to take full advantage of the power for people to feel a box is worth it. That expectation bloats team sizes (and by extension, costs) and to be more secure in a high risk-high reward project, they play it safe (which is why I think a lot of the industry is facing creative bankruptcy). Few franchises are proper exceptions because they're damn near entitled to a ROI.
But other than that? I'd say the adoption of Blu-ray in the PS3 kind of acted as the architect to some of the things some of us hate today. The decision to adopt it resulted in painfully show loading times because the drive was slow in the PS3. The result was mandating every console to have an HDD for installs, and Xbox 360 then discontinued those arcade models and every console came with an HDD. That adopted standard lead to a lot of games that were physical only to be available via download and that laid a path for digital distribution and the gradual death of physical media we're witnessing now. It was always going to be this way eventually, but it's hard to think that guaranteeing a HDD didn't lay some important groundwork. And now with crazy fast SSD storage and download speeds, it's gotten worse and now we're bloody streaming games via cloud computing.
Really great take on how we got to this point. Will add that the weaponizing/monetizing of the "console warring" concept, accelerated/facilitated all of your points. When you take what used to be simple bantering and jabbing between different fanbases and throw money/resources at it as the most effective marketing tool, instead of improving any areas that might add longevity to your products, you only improve sales while creating a destructive environment. Which now has come full circle. Gaming media/tech sites capitalized on this as well. So we now end up in a landscape where we get less for more, nobody is held accountable (unless you are Nintendo in which case, you will always be blamed for everything including world hunger) and what you now call and parade as "greed" to defend you own greedy company is years upon years of every asshat that has paid in $$$ what these companies get away with today, but yeah that "burn" or "you got ratioed" or "fanboy" this and that was worth it huh.
It's also screwing over gamers with limited budgets for PC hardware, well Nvidia is trying to at least.
OK, but what did Shu do about this while he was working in the industry?
If he felt so strongly about it, why didn't he quit sooner?
I'm honestly getting a bit tired of seeing this guy come out with all this stuff, week after week, yet he didn't seem to do anything about it when he was a prominent figure IN the industry.
*I got passed over for the CEO role and sidelined into an Indies CRM role, but I just sucked it up and did it for several years.* Great.
"If he felt so strongly about it, why didn't he quit sooner?"
Jim Ryan held him and down and demoted him to Indy role as you pointed out. We all wondered why Shuhei was never put in charge in the past and everyone else seemingly passing him up in high position's. Everyone getting promoted except him. He also spoke up about the LS awhile ago then folded and was actually help make Concord.
If it's not making the most money and attempt to have conversation that maximize profit they won't promote. Why? Because Shuhei was seemingly for the ppl.
Despite his 80$ comment on games.
'then folded and was actually help make Concord'.
Right, so once again he just sucked it up and went against what he thought was the correct path.
He also clearly didn't turn things around for Concord.
Seriously, if he felt so strongly about this stuff he should have quit ages ago; not just suck it up for years and then bitch about it to the public AFTER he quit.
Agree.
It’s easy to armchair QB other people’s decisions, but it’s all speculation. Maybe he loved Sony and wanted to see if things would turn around. It’s also hard to leave a place when you have been there so long. You think you have friends who will help you out, until you don’t. The corporate world really is dog eat dog. Having obligations like family also makes you do things you may not want to do in a perfect world. But this world is far from perfect, and so are we. So I will cut Shu some slack.
"Right, so once again he just sucked it up at went against what he thought was the correct path."
I mean yeah. He didn't have much of a choice. It was either go with what Jim wanted or get fired.
He went against LS but had to help with it anyway. Probably talked about all the bad spending that Sony was doing (and still are.) Corps don't want you to talk sense, they want to I to talk cents. That's goes for everybody.
Not sure why he didn't leave earlier he probably wanted to wait for the right opportunity to leave on a high note or leave on his terms. Much better than getting forced out.
Yeah, and sure, leadership don't want anyone rocking the boat; they just want 'yes' people through the ranks, but Shu didn't quit and make a point; he sucked it up for months or years. Nor did he go out on a high note.
If he felt so strongly about this stuff he should have told Jim to shove it, and join xbox, but he didn't.
At least he's talking about it and it's not just some anonymous internet person. That's why I posted his take. He was on the inside.
He knows better than most what's going on.
We live in a weird world where primary sources don't mean anything, evidence and reason hold no weight, but rumors and speculation hold the day.
Yeah, agree in general, but pretty much everything he's said since he quit could have been covered in a 30 minute interview.
Next week:
In a new interview, Shu reveals that he knew factions was going to get canned months in advance, but was powerless to do anything about it so just sat back and kept his mouth shut (and getting a juicy salary).
@SO1D
Was just going to say this. You can say this about anybody. Anyone on n4g that complains about greed but are doing nothing at their jobs to stop it... How dare you!
@ Outside
It's not just greed though; it's flat out bad decisions and poor leadership, and Shu was one of those leaders.
Because everyone knows you can really change the industry by quitting and being an outsider. I mean, his comments now aren't changing the industry at all. What would have been the advantage of doing it 8 years earlier?
He didn't, and doesn't, have to be an outsider though.
And great job by him calling out all of this stuff in hindsight. 'The Embracer thing turned out to be a train wreck'. Was he predicting this as it was happening?
As gamers we also need to make it clear what we want. Do we want fancy RT and RT
shadows, global illumination etc? Oh that's right we have to do the internet thing and brag about all those things. What we need is innovative gameplay mechanics and deeper more dynamic story telling and reactive realistic worlds and characters imo. Emphasis on Innovative gameplay mechanics. Expedition 33 was made by a tiny group of 30 ppl. Not sure what the budget was but I know it wasn't no 400m$ project or nothing crazy like that.
They join the Baldurs Gate team for being independent and releasing great game with out corporate meddling and stupidly big budget's that kills jobs and studios. If more groups get to together remain independent and create games for gamers and fans this industry would be better off in the future. Again it's about getting away from big corpos because corpos aren't gonna change, ever, they're just not. Scary to be out on your own? Yes but high risk high reward again as we've seen.
Former Sony Interactive Entertainment executive Shuhei Yoshida has shared how his feedback played a role in the success of Gran Turismo.
To this day, anyone that plays a GT game for the first time and doesn't have experience with this kind of game will crash at the first corner, so not really sure what Shu is claiming here. I literally saw this happen a few months ago at an event where they had GT7 with VR2 up on a stage and members of the public got to try it out.
Uncanny valley is a good word to describe the current situation in gaming. We will probably reach true photo realism in 3-5 years and I'm sure these consoles will be able to display that. Of course, PC's are able to do it already but gaming always evolved by the pace of consoles so the true "next gen" experiences will be primarily available on these consoles. First Party content will again play a huge role this generation.
That's interesting. I never really got uncanny valley from TLOU. They stylized it in a way that looks real without looking too real. Kind of like a maturely drawn anime. The updated visuals can only help, I think.
first ps4 games (U4, Order86 for example) will reach cgi-level
last ps4 games (TLOU2 for example) will reach photo-realism
I was hoping for more weapons and gameplay but it already is a masterpiece.
Good thing I held off on getting it when it came out.