Shuhei Yoshida has worked in the video game industry for decades. He was president of SIE Worldwide Studios during a very important time in PlayStation’s history, and his fans love him very much. He was given a BAFTA fellowship for all he has done for the gaming industry and how he has helped it grow.

He is in charge of Sony’s Independent Developer Initiative right now, which helps independent developers bring their projects to life by setting up partnership and marketing deals. But some people think that the PS5 isn’t as friendly to independent developers as previous generations. We’ve written a lot about this in the past.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Yoshida talked about the difficulties of getting the word out and what he hopes to accomplish in the future. He said, “We’re trying to change people’s ideas about how hard it is to make and publish games for the PlayStation. This is a communication challenge we’ve been working on.”

Yoshida says that this is being done with a sort of PR blitz: “We’ve been doing conference tours, going to events, giving talks and keynotes, and other things to let developers know that we’re open to having their games on PlayStation.”

Yoshida says, “There are so many great quality games that no one knows about. It’s always been hard to get funding, but there’s more and more money coming into the industry all the time. Digital storefronts can have an unlimited number of games because they’re digital, but there’s only so much space at the front of the storefront.”

Subscription services like PS Plus could help with this problem by giving players another way to get them to try a game they normally wouldn’t. Yoshida says, “People who have subscribed to the service already have access to all these games, so there’s a better chance that your game will be tried by people who didn’t know it existed,” so subscription services can help more people find good games.

We don’t know if Journey will ever get back to its glory days, but we wish Mr. Yoshida the best of luck with this project. How do you feel about the state of indie games on the PS5?