After being treated poorly by PlayStation over the publishing of ‘Demon’s Souls’, FromSoftware didn’t want to work with the company on ‘Dark Souls’, former PlayStation president Shuhei Yoshida has said.
FromSoftware didn’t want to work with PlayStation on ‘Dark Souls’ over the studio’s poor treatment with ‘Demon’s Souls’.
Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida – who headed up Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios from 2008 to 2019 – revealed that after the company didn’t publish ‘Demon’s Souls’ in the West as it had originally agreed to in 2009, FromSoftware wanted to cut ties with PlayStation when it came to publishing its 2011 RPG ‘Dark Souls’.
Appearing on the ‘Sacred Symbols+’ podcast, Yoshida said: “FromSoftware was already working on the sequel, but they were so disappointed with how PlayStation treated them, we wanted to work with them again but they passed on it.”
The ex-PlayStation president admitted he wasn’t impressed with ‘Demon’s Souls’ when he played it, though later knew the studio had “dropped the ball” on the Soulsbourne series after the first game proved to be a success.
He explained: “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.
“I said, ‘This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.’ So I put it aside.
“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.”
Instead of PlayStation publishing ‘Dark Souls’, FromSoftware turned to Bandai Namco to handle its RPG.
FromSoftware wanted to cut ties with PlayStation over poor Demon’s Souls treatment
