Either Yoshida is suffering from dementia or he was buttering up the exec in public. I'd choose the latter. He had already come out multiple interviews and told he was given the choice of work in the new position or get out. Not sure how simple this can be.
Start listing sources, instead of listing random titles.
Shawn Layden, the former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, told The Ringer he views live-service titles as "a repetitive action engagement device," arguing that actual games require a story, a character, and a world rather than looped engagement mechanics designed to keep...
www.notebookcheck.net
Yoshida isn't suffering dementia. He, mentioned to have greenlighted games like Concord. Shawn Layden also mentioned the PC games was his idea.
And we know most of their games when were greenlighted or (shortly after) started development. Many of them list when they started development in their wikipedia page. Others are made by studios that only have one team, so they start a game when the previous gets completed. Regarding Insomniac roadmap and approved projects, we have the leaked files.
We also know that the change from Shuhei to Hermen was made in November 2019, that Shawn Layden left butthurted a bit earlier in September once he realized that he wasn't going to replace Shuhei. And that Jim Ryan started as CEO April 2019.
Finally, attributing or absolving responsibility based solely on who "started" a project misunderstands how greenlighting works at Sony or any division of corporation. Multi-million projects like video game approvals are committee and board driven at multiple stage because it involves discussing full production, funding that is constantly re-scoped at different stages. Yoshida can't greenlight anything as his position does not allow it, and he can only provide feedbacks and suggestions to the upper managements of SIE and Jimbo himself. Everything from aggressive AAA live service to PC expansion happened under Jim Ryan as CEO under his tenure.
Trying to whitewash that Jim Ryan wasn't responsible for GaaS push is comical.
The strategy of both GaaS and expanding to PC was started by Shuhei and Shawn, and many of the GaaS were greenlighted by them. This is a fact, period. What is comical is to say it was a Jim Ryan thing when we know it isn't the case at all and that strategy was running years before and that when he started there were many projects already under development.
Shuhei was the head of WWS (now called PS Studios) so he was the main responsible of greenlighting first and second party games until November 2019 and their first/2nd party strategy, period. Above him he only had the SCE CEO (House or Kodera when the GaaS and PC ports strategy were designed). At that time Shawn was chairman of WWS, so was involved in the strategy as himself said, but not in the greenlight process of specific games even if was aware of them. Same goes when he was head of SCEA (which is a regional subdisiary to market and sell the console and games in that region, but of what today is SIE, not what today is PS Studios).
Under them yes, there's a comitee/editorial/portfolio team that reviews many things for the greenlights like budgets, roadmaps, market research, the technical things like story/design/character design/tons of other things. But the two give the final ok and sign is the head of the publisher / first party studios (Yoshida or Hermen) and -without looking at the projects having people under them verifying everything is ok because they mostly sign sfuff and manage C level people and tweak the high level strategy of the company- the CEO.
And no, the board of directors of SIE or the Sony Group of a company like Sony aren't involved on greenlighting games.
Jim Ryan basically doubled down and increased budgets and teams in all the areas of the company, including the GaaS and PC one, which already were there. In the same way he also doubled down in the SP non-GaaS first party games, the 2nd party deals, the 3rd party deals, PSN, their game subs, off-gaming adaptations, hardware and accesories. He doubled down in anything, grew everything and as result almost all metrics ended in all time record numbers.
In GaaS yes, he doubled down. But also he an Hermen killed related turds, gave Helldivers 2 a 5 years long delay, signed some of the most available top talent for their type of projects (like Bungie or ARC System Works) and most of the projects he and Hermen greenlighted weren't GaaS but instead top tier SP games.
gamerant.com
had a rational basis once upon a time. It doesn't make sense now because Xbox never used the nuclear option...but I don't think anyone could've foreseen 5-10 years ago that buying enormous publishers for billions of dollars would inspire Xbox to become more multiplatform.
