Shuhei Yoshida says he was ‘fired’ from his role as PlayStation studio president because he ‘didn’t listen to’ Jim Ryan

Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida claims he was “fired” from his role as SIE Worldwide Studios president because he didn’t listen to then-CEO Jim Ryan.

The popular executive quit Sony last year after 31 years at the company, where he helped launch the original PlayStation, and served as its president of SIE Worldwide Studios between 2008 and 2019.

In 2019 it was announced that Yoshida had stepped down to work on a new initiative focusing on building relationships with indie developers, with Hermen Hulst replacing him as president.

Since then, however, Yoshida has stated a number of times that it wasn’t his decision to step down as president, and that while he enjoyed his new role working with indie studios, he had to take it or leave PlayStation altogether.

Yoshida’s latest comments came when he attended the Alt:Games festival in Australia this past weekend, where he was giving a talk on Sunday about what makes an indie game successful when he reportedly made the comments.

As reported by This Week in Video Games, Yoshida listed some of his achievements as Worldwide Studios president, then claimed he was fired for not agreeing to do certain things (which he didn’t specify) for Ryan.

“I helped Santa Monica to make God of War, Naughty Dog to make Uncharted and The Last of Us, and Sucker Punch to make the beautiful Ghost of Tsushima,” Yoshida reportedly said. “Ghost of Tsushima was one of the last games that I worked on as the president of Worldwide Studios.

“But in 2019, after 11 years leading the first-party development, I was fired from the role. Jim Ryan wanted to remove me from first-party because I didn’t listen to him. He asked to do some ridiculous things, and I said ‘no’.”

The report states that Yoshida said this in a jovial manner, leading to laugher from the audience, but this isn’t the first time Yoshida has discussed his removal from the SIE Worldwide Studios president role.

Last year, a month after he left Sony, Yoshida stated that he was didn’t choose to step down in 2019 and was instead forced to take the new indies role, because the alternative would have been leaving PlayStation altogether.

“Moving from first-party to indies? Well, I had no choice,” Yoshida explained to VentureBeat in February 2025. “When Jim asked me to do the indie job, the choice was to do that or leave the company. But I felt very strongly about the state of PlayStation and indies. I really wanted to do this. I believed I could do something unique for that purpose.”

Yoshida also told Kinda Funny last year that if he had still been Worldwide Studios president he would have resisted the company’s push for live service games, joking: “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.”