SHUHEI YOSHIDA RECEIVES THE BIG CONFERENCE HONORARY AWARD

Shuhei Yoshida received today the Bilbao International Games Conference (BIG Conference) first honorary award. Yoshida joined BIG Conference's co-director Antonio Santo for a fireside chat in which he reflected on his career and gave his opinion on the industry's current state.

Yoshida started his career at Sony way before the PlayStation was developed. But he soon made it into the team responsible for creating it: "Ken Kutaragi told me he was working on a machine with revolutionary graphics and planned to sell it for less than 500 dollars. I thought he was lying —joked Yoshida—. I was the first person with a non-technical background to join that team. My task was to talk to Japanese studios and publishers to convince them to publish their games on PlayStation".

PlayStation's beginnings weren't easy, according to Yoshida. "A publisher once told me to revisit them once we reached one million sales. Our marketing team even used that sentence. We eventually sold one million units. And I went back to visit that publisher".

Yoshida told a story about PlayStation's rough beginnings: "Our first-year sales in Japan were good. But we were competing against Sega, and Saturn had a good second year. They released Virtua Fighter 2 and other strong titles. Our catalog wasn't that strong that second year, but we had a good lineup in Europe and the United States, so our performance there was good. Everything changed when we convinced SquareSoft and Enix, which owned the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest IPs, two of the most popular IPs in Japan, to release them on PlayStation".

PlayStation 3 was Sony's only console that was not the best-selling console of its generation. A fact that allowed the company to pivot to return to the path of success with PlayStation 4: "Making games for PS3 was challenging because the architecture was very peculiar. For Ken Kutaragi, a good computer engineer should be able to solve any problem. But those challenges were tough on PS3. The company had to pivot, Kaz Hirai became CEO of SCE and changed the approach to make PC-like machines that were very easy to program for, like PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4."

This prize pays tribute to an industry icon that helped establish the PlayStation brand when he joined the team responsible for designing Sony's first home console in 1993. Yoshida has been a key figure for PlayStation (he was appointed Vice President in 2000, then Senior Vice President in 2007) until he took the role of President of SIE Worldwide Studios, then called Sony Computer Entertainment, a position he held from 2008 to 2019. Today, Shuhei Yoshida still enjoys his passion for video games. He works closely with indie developers worldwide, focusing on giving them advice and encouraging them to explore new and unexpected experiences that will help the gaming industry push its limits.