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In a candid interview with Game Informer the Sony exec agreed that passing on Demon's Souls was one of Sony's biggest errors in software publishing this generation.
He went on to explain the rationale behind the decision, offering a breakdown of the 'horizontal' development system in Japan, which he says resulted in the game being misjudged.
"The game development in Japan typically is made horizontally where all assets are made in parallel, so it's difficult to figure out what the final state of the game is going to be," he said.
"The western style game development is typically a vertical slice. So in the very early process, the team tried to create a small piece of the experience that resembles the final product. What happened with Demon's Souls was until very late in the game's development, we were not able to play the game through."
According to Yoshida, Sony sampled the game at a time when it was technically unstable, and his own negative experiences coloured the decision making process.
"There were framerate issues and the network was not up and running. We underestimated the quality of the game and to be honest, the media in Japan did the same.
"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."