PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida has revealed during an interview on the Sacred Symbols podcast that he feels the decline of the double-A market contributed to the closure of Sony Japan Studio.
When asked about the studio’s closure, Yoshida-san, who was with Sony for 30 years and headed up Worldwide Studios during his time with the format holder, revealed that shifting market conditions resulted in Sony gradually moving its focus away from IP made at Studio Japan.
During my time, people give me credit, but one of the things I was not successful at was having a successful service game, and the other thing is I was not able to have amazingly successful games made in Japan. Other than Gran Turismo, we had many great products but didn’t really have many triple-A-level successful products. That became more and more important as the big games became bigger – the indies filled the gap and the double-A market seems to have disappeared.
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Most of the IPs that Japan Studio had were in that smaller double-A sized group and the market became really difficult for these kinds of games. For example, after Gravity Rush 2, [Keiichiro Toyama, the game’s director and creator of Silent Hill] tried to come up with a new concept, but we were not able to greenlight any of his new concepts, even though they were really interesting.
Speaking in a separate interview with VentureBeat, Yoshida said that it ‘feels right‘ if Sony were to release the PS6 in 2028, feeling the year before would be ‘a bit too early’ for the new system to arrive.
[Source – Sacred Symbols+ Podcast]