No Bloodborne, Why The Vita Failed, And More Stories From Sony Ex-Executive

Sony recently announced that long term member Shuhei Yoshida has left the company, and that has allowed him to be a bit more candid about some of the biggest turns in recent Sony history. Why did the Vita fail? Why isn’t there another Bloodborne? Why did he get knocked down from PlayStation first party lead?

Yoshida has been rather open about a lot of these topics in a recent interview. The first being a blunt reason on why Bloodborne hasn’t been remastered or relevant for some time. He states FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki’s, the series creator, is simply too busy.

“People wonder why we haven’t really done anything,” Yoshida said. “My theory is because I remember Miyazaki-san really, really loved Bloodborne, what he created. So I think he is interested but he’s so successful and so busy, so he cannot do it himself and he doesn’t want anyone else to touch it. So that’s my theory and the PlayStation team respects his wish. I am not revealing any secret information.”

This aligns with a recent rumors around the studio talking about FromSoftware wanting to emphasis their own projects. Bloodborne was co-published with Sony, which put it on a backburner. Now that Sony owns a large stake in FromSoftware’s parent company, things might change.

Shuhei also explained why he thinks the PS Vita, Sony’s last handheld gaming device, failed for the company. Among many different complaints, he felt the rear touchpad was not necessary and more of a gimmick, but requiring it drove up the cost of the unit. Along with that, consumers openly disliked the Vita’s proprietary memory cards, which was a hidden cost for gamers. But ultimately the failure came because Vita was not a focus for Sony, and the bandwidth went towards PS3 and the launch of PS4.

“I think the biggest reason Vita didn’t do as well as we had hoped was we had to split all our efforts and resources into two different platforms,” Yoshida explained. “We didn’t have that resource.”

With Steam Deck, and several similar devices, becoming extremely popular among gamers, and a newly announced Nintendo Switch 2, it’s likely that Sony will return to the handheld market in some way. Even Microsoft has been heavily hinting that a handheld Xbox is in the works.

However, to me, the biggest statement he made was the whole reason he was somewhat pushed out of PlayStation. Shuhei doesn’t exactly explain why he walked away after 31 years, but he does hint that he was somewhat forced to step aside into the indie market because he disagreed with the overall direction of PlayStation. While he helped PlayStation secure some phenomenal indie games, the overall company was striving to go towards live service games.

“For me, I was managing this budget, so I was responsible for allocating money to what kinds of games to make. If the company was considering (going) that way, it probably didn’t make sense to stop making another God of War or single-player game, and put all the money into the live service games.”

He continued, “I hope that this strategy will work in the end. If I was in the Hermen’s position, probably I would’ve tried to resist that direction. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they removed me from the first-party,” Yoshida ended.

Yoshida notes that the company actually went in a proper direction of keeping first party games funded, while providing additional funding towards live service games. He just simply disagreed with it becoming a focus. And with an absolute dud like Concord, it’s hard to disagree.

 

Dustin
Dustinhttps://www.indyplanet.com/cypress-3
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