Having served as a prolific producer at PlayStation from the start of the brand until becoming president of what's now PlayStation Studios, Shuhei Yoshida knows a thing or two about greenlighting successful games. Now that's he's left PlayStation to head his own consulting firm, he's opening up on what happens when a game isn't looking like a hit.
"In the worst case, we kind of calculate how much more money we have to spend to finish this game," Yoshida says in an interview with Game File (paywalled). "If the revenue seems lower than the money we need to spend to finish, we cancel the project. We cancelled lots of projects after the prototype level and no one knows in public. And that's fine. That's just a process, right?"
But while prototype projects get canceled all the time – a recently discovered PSP pitch is a great example – sometimes a game's in full production before it becomes clear that it's financially untenable. "Sometimes the game is in deep production," Yoshida says. "The largest I canceled were two games, after we spent $25 million. At that time, that was lots of money. Now, not as much. I felt really bad about how we couldn't see this."
I'd love to know which two games Yoshida is talking about, but he doesn't specify – clearly, they must be older titles if $25 million was considered a lot "at the time." Still, given how many bangers came out of Sony's first-party development wing over the decades, it seems Yoshida was shepherding a lot of the right titles, and his advice led to measures like a seemingly essential delay for God of War.
"I always believed that [the reason] why I was able to work very well with developers and studios was because I know I cannot make games," Yoshida continues. "I produced, so I was really harsh on producers. That's what I used to do, but other than producing… artists, programmers, other functions, I had just respect for all these people."
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