Sony Wasn’t Forcing Its Studios To Make Live Service Games, Says Shuhei Yoshida (www.psu.com)

Since retiring,

, former Sony president and head of indie games at PlayStation, has done a number of interviews. In each of them, he’s been more and more forthcoming about certain details regarding his storied tenure with the company.

In his latest interview with Last Stand Media on the Sacred Symbols+ podcast (paywall), Yoshida shared a key insight regarding PlayStation’s live-service game push.

At time of writing, we’ve seen how Sony’s live service push hasn’t exactly gone the way it would have hoped. It’s been a common theory among players that the internal studios under PlayStation Studios were being forced to work on these projects, by Sony. But Yoshida-san says that’s not the case.

“From my experience, when studios see the company has a big initiative, they understand riding on that gives them a better chance of getting a project approved and supported. So it’s not like the current head of PlayStation Studios, Herman Hulst, is telling teams that they need to make live service games, it’s likely mutual.”

Now we know that Sony hasn’t been directly ordering its internal studios to pitch and develop live service games. Sony was instead just making it clear to its internal studios, that it wanted a big live service game, and any pitch that wasn’t a live service game would struggle to be supported, or even approved at all.

Which means we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief, that no team in the PlayStation Studios family is being ‘forced’ into becoming a live-service studio.

Source – [Last Stand Media via MP1st]