Shuhei Yoshida: “Our Bigger Teams Are Getting Bigger,” “People Like the Big Budget, Huge Experiences”

It feels weird having gone this long without doing a post about Shuhei Yoshida (5 whole days!), but thankfully, the President of Sony Worldwide Studios was featured on MCV, where he re-iterated that he thinks Journey, an indie title, is a system seller “in terms of the impact it makes.”

Putting so much time and effort into indie titles is something Sony is clearly doing at this point, but Shuhei took some time to talk about Sony’s own studios:

Development has polarized now. Our bigger teams are getting bigger and we are not doing many mid-sized games any more. So we are either working on larger projects, or very small ones – many of the latter. I think that trend will continue because people like the big budget, huge experiences. And I love them too. So maybe we may not be able to make more of these in terms of numbers but there is always a demand for the ‘wow factor’.

That’s where there are some relations between the larger triple-A games and the indie boom because consumers are always wanting something new.

Shuhei then warned that “if we are just doing big budget AAA sequels, the industry doesn’t have a bright future. We need new ideas to be tried out. And while of course the big teams are trying new ideas too, the amount of resources needed and the financial risk is so large that they have to set a certain limit on that. That’s where the indies come in.”

Which development teams do you think Sony should put the most money behind? Let us know in the comments below.

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