In an interview, Shuhei Yoshida spoke about the gaming industry and the future of video games. He would find it a bit “boring” if all top games consisted of service games. At the same time, Sony relies on exactly this strategy.
Who is Shuhei Yoshida? As the former head of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, the 59-year-old is one of the company’s best-known faces. He is now Head of Independent Developer Initiative at Sony and received the BAFTA Fellowship award for his work in March 2023.
In an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Shuhei Yoshida spoke about his career and the current situation in the industry. He also talked about current developments in the industry.
Sony is currently using news-style advertising. That also caused confusion. This is one of their spots:
Live from PS5: “News” ad
More videos
Yoshida hopes for creative, new ideas
Shuhei Yoshida speaks to The Guardian about receiving the BAFTA in March 2023 and provides insights into his work and current developments in the gaming industry.
He also takes a look into the future, but above all he wants creative and diverse ideas. However, he finds one trend a bit monotonous in the long run if it dominates the top ranks in gaming:
We are talking about so-called service games, which are mostly designed as multiplayer games to keep players loyal over a longer period of time through constant new content.
“The industry is growing and growing and I hope it continues to support and nurture creative ideas and people working on new things. You don’t want every year’s top 10 games to be almost identical and all games to become service games… That would be a bit boring to me.”
Shuehei Yoshida via The Guardian
What are Sony’s plans? In fact, in the future Sony would like to focus more on the games that Shuhei Yoshida is hoping for some creative variety. According to the US site Axios, Sony development studios are currently working on 12 such titles.
We already have more information about 7 of them and know that brand new brands are included:
Sony is planning 12 new service games like Destiny and GTA Online for PS5 – we have information on 7
What else does he have to say about the future of gaming? Shuhei Yoshida also sees the potential in artificial intelligence tools to make game development accessible to more people while reducing the cost of making a game.
He says: “I was just this morning looking at 15 pitches in an indies competition in Japan and one of them had incredibly beautiful graphics made by a small team of students”.
To create the graphics, they would have used Midjourney, an AI capable of generating images.
“It’s very impressive that a small number of young people can create an amazingly good looking game. In the future, AI could come up with interesting animations and behaviors and even debug your program.”
When asked what he thinks about the developers’ fear that AI could replace people in this area, he remains calm: After all, you still need someone who can also operate the tool and human creativity is more important than AI .
Here you can find more about the topic: KI Midjourney inspires the Internet with pictures on demand – should soon radically change how games are developed