14 DAY TRIAL // Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony's Worldwide Studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, helped the company reach its most profitable year since 1998.
Back in 1998, Sony launched the MiniDisc players and the first "Men in Black" movie, which grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide within its first year.
The launch of the PlayStation 4 saw the company's games business not only survive but turn a healthy profit, and show the best performance in the history of its consoles.
With the rampant growth of the mobile gaming sector and the abundance of free-to-play games, Sony (among others) is showing that full-priced retail games are here to stay, with more games than ever being planned for the near future.
Yoshida believes that the key to the PS4's success is the amount of diversity that the system is offering, and judging by the sales figures, the company is certainly doing something right.
Sony backed both large franchises like Uncharted, with its studios developing a ton of high-quality AAA games, and small indie studios looking to craft unique experiences that go outside the gaming norm, like thatgamecompany's Journey.
A diverse industry is a healthy industry
"The industry's focus has narrowed too much. Can we continue producing interesting new products? That's become a real concern," Yoshida says during an interview with Bloomberg.
The trend is for big developers to focus their output on a handful of best-selling franchises, but Yoshida believes that supporting small studios leads to a more vibrant industry.
The company's investments have paid off so far, both in terms of sales and customer satisfaction, and the fact that Yoshida lends his attention to small-scale projects like The Tomorrow Children as much as to any blockbuster title is a big factor in the equation.
Yoshida has been working for Sony for around two decades, ever since the first PlayStation home console was created, and he has been in charge of the corporation's game development efforts since 2008.
The latest figures pertaining to PS4 sales put the console at 19 million units worldwide, a lot more than its direct competitor's, with the Xbox One computer entertainment system from Microsoft sitting at around 11 million units sold.
