The shift of the Final Fantasy series from Nintendo platforms onto PlayStation helped shape the future of both publishers, but it took some social engineering from Sony to make it happen.
In an interview with GameSpot, former Sony Interactive Entertainment lead Shuhei Yoshida shed some light on the inner workings of Sony throughout his lengthy tenure at the company.
In the interview, he explains how Sony managed to win Squaresoft (now Square Enix) over to the PlayStation after multiple console generations of primarily releasing their games on Nintendo platforms, which played a major role in cementing the PlayStation as the dominant console in Japan.
According to Yoshida, the key to making that happen was some serious “schmoozing” from his boss.
Schmoozing Their Way To Dominance
Nintendo and Squaresoft famously had a falling-out over Nintendo’s refusal to make the change from cartridges to disks with the Nintendo 64, despite Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s efforts to convince them to reconsider, leading to plans for Final Fantasy VII to be released on the console to be scrapped.
However, the PlayStation wasn’t the only console of the upcoming generation to use the CD-ROM, and Sony was scrambling to get Squaresoft to commit to their console rather than moving over to the Sega Saturn.
At the time, Yoshida was part of the third-party licensing team for the PlayStation, led by “The Father of the PlayStation” Ken Kutaragi, and they were the ones responsible for eventually winning companies like Squaresoft over.
According to Yoshida, the responsibility to make that happen ended up falling on the shoulders of his boss, who came from Sony Music Japan, and was, in Yoshida’s words, a “really amazing schmoozer.”
He hung out with another vice president of Square who was running the business side. I was taken with them to have dinner or do karaoke so many times, and he schmoozed and somehow convinced them that Sony is easy to work with. – Shuhei Yoshida.
“That’s how business is done in Japan!” he says. It all comes down to karaoke and alcohol.
That wasn’t the only way Sony Music influenced the success of the PlayStation, though, as Yoshida recalls that they were the ones who insisted on the spotlighting of game developers, saying, “In their mind, game creators are artists like musicians.”
This was a time when the norm was for developers to be required to go by pseudonyms in credits to avoid them being headhunted by other companies. Sony broke the mold by not just allowing them to be credited by their real names, but actively putting them in the limelight.
But PlayStation said, “Let’s get the magazine to interview creators; let’s make them stars!” – Shuhei Yoshida
And that’s how Sony won over third-party developers to the PlayStation: a combination of aggressive schmoozing and giving creators the spotlight they deserved.
Yoshida moved from his position at the head of Sony Interactive Entertainment to head the PlayStation Indies initiative in 2019, before eventually retiring earlier this year, but he still has plenty of thoughts to share about the future of PlayStation.
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