Shuhei Yoshida
Former SIE president Shuhei Yoshida said that Sony missed the chance to publish the beloved Dark Souls because its publishing strategy for Demon’s Souls had disappointed the developer, FromSoftware.
According to what he shared at the Sacred Symbols podcast (via VGC), the original plan for Demon’s Souls was to be released globally by Sony, who, however, changed their mind later. The high difficulty of the genre-defining game, plus the negative reception during early playtests, contributed to Sony’s decision. Even Yoshida himself didn’t enjoy it. “For my personal experience with Demon’s Souls, when it was close to final, I spent close to two hours playing it, and after two hours, I was still standing at the beginning at the game.” So, he had a conclusion: “This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game. So I put it aside.”
Luckily, other publishers came in to bring the game to hardcore players outside of Japan. Atlus released the game in North America, while Namco handled the release in Europe, and it was well received by gamers. “We definitely dropped the ball from a publishing standpoint, including studio management side. We were not able to see the value of the product we were making,” Yoshida admitted.
At that time, FromSoftware was already working on the spiritual successor, Dark Souls. Sony definitely wouldn’t want to miss the chance this time, but the choice was not in their hands. “They [FromSoftware] were so disappointed with how PlayStation treated them, we wanted to work with them again, but they passed on it,” Yoshida said. The developer teamed up with Bandai Namco on the Dark Souls series, as they did for many of the other titles like Elden Ring, the upcoming Elden Ring Nightreign, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, and more.
And this hiccup obviously didn’t make the two parties enemies. They cooperated again a few years later to release Bloodborne exclusively for PlayStation 4. “We have huge respect for Miyazaki and we were able to work with them again,” Yoshida said.
In the last month of 2024, the two companies signed a strategic capital and business alliance agreement. Sony now becomes the largest shareholder of Kadokawa, the owner of FromSoftware, holding roughly 10% of its shares, including those previously acquired in early 2021.
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