Shuhei Yoshida Missed Demon's Souls' Potential and Undermined FromSoftware - A Misjudgment the Sony Veteran Is Still Reminded Of

Due to Yoshida's reaction to Demon's Souls, other PlayStation divisions decided there was something wrong with the game and didn't want to get involved with it.

Today, many players know FromSoftware, but before Elden Ring and Dark Souls, the studio released Demon's Souls, a game whose potential was not recognized immediately. Recently, former SIE Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida shared his memories of his first encounter with the game.

According to him, he had just returned to Japan after working in the US. At that time, Demon's Souls was almost finished, and he was offered to play it. Shuhei Yoshida spent a couple of hours in the game but couldn't get far — he got stuck at the very beginning, constantly dying. He told the testing team: "It's hard, isn't it?"

There was no hype around Demon's Souls during its initial release. It received not-so-high ratings from Famitsu, and the first disc shipments were small. Rumors about the quality of this game reached international PlayStation divisions, so Demon's Souls was not published outside its home country.

However, word-of-mouth worked: the unusual game began to be actively discussed online — in a positive light. Players started praising Demon's Souls, so eventually, companies like Atlus and Bandai Namco took notice. They risked acting as publishers of the project in the West and Europe, and FromSoftware's project was also very popular with the local audience.

Yoshida shared that he is often criticized by foreign users along the lines of: "You're that Yoshida who didn't see the charm of Demon's Souls, aren't you?"