Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida, who spent over three many years on the firm earlier than departing earlier this yr, feels “silly cash” is accountable for the wave of studio closures and layoffs which have dominated the online game business following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Throughout a wide-ranging chat at Gamescom LATAM, Yoshida mentioned it stays “completely doable” for the business to change into actually sustainable, however claimed that may require the largest gamers and buyers to cease treating the market like a fabled golden goose.
“What we have been seeing for the final two years is simply the adjustment to the misjudged [spending] by so many corporations throughout the COVID days,” he defined, pointing to the ill-fated M&A spree undertaken by Embracer Group for example of a progress tactic that appeared extremely short-sighted.
“Many corporations and even the analysts believed the loopy progress [during the pandemic] would proceed. In order that they over-invested and over-hired they usually began too many initiatives, however after COVID there have been much more methods for folks to entertain themselves so the expansion slowed down.”
Yoshida described the scenario that has left 1000’s of builders out of labor (together with many at his former employer Sony) as “very unhappy,” however claimed the “silly cash” that helped spark that age of over-investment has departed the online game business looking for the following large factor.
Yoshida feels numerous portfolios and smaller initiatives can ship stability
Does that imply there’s trigger for quiet optimism? Yoshida believes so, however feels the biggest corporations want to start (sensibly) investing in portfolio reasonably than pinning all of their monetary hopes on a handful of gargantuan initiatives with no margin for error.
“Every product is completely different, proper? Some dwell service video games are profitable—like Helldivers 2. So you can not simply take one product [or model] and say they’re all unsuitable. Particularly with leisure merchandise, no one can predict gross sales, particularly when new IPs are tried,” he continued.
“I’ve labored with entrepreneurs up to now they usually at all times miss the numbers. So, what large corporations ought to do is spend money on a portfolio of titles—as a result of if they only spend money on a small variety of titles it is an enormous threat. Even if you spend money on current profitable franchises, as a result of folks’s tastes will change.”
It is also essential, says Yoshida, to average the quantity invested throughout that portfolio.
He explains that as a result of large corporations must compete with rivals of comparable dimension and stature, budgets can rapidly balloon as opponents try to outdo one another. The antidote to that budgetary arms race, he suggests, is to appreciate that “generally limitation is basically useful” for studios and builders seeking to push themselves creatively.
It is a sentiment that chimes with the recommendation handed out by Astro Bot director Nicolas Doucet at GDC 2025, the place he reminded attendees that “it is okay to make a small recreation.”
“A whole lot of the alternatives we made with Astro Bot could possibly be labelled double-A or perhaps missing in ambition—like the dimensions of the staff, the dimensions of the sport, the very fact there is no textual content, no voice, and its not an open world,” added Doucet. “However that does not actually matter. We nonetheless made a recreation that made folks actually completely happy, and actually it was in all probability the simplicity that a variety of gamers made time for.”
