Sony President Hiroki Totoki Takes Over as Interim CEO of PlayStation - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 April 2024 / 5,042 Views
Jim Ryan left Sony at the end of last week as the PlayStation President and CEO and now Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki has taken over as the interim CEO of PlayStation.
Totoki will continue as the president, COO and CFO of Sony, while also overseeing PlayStation until a permanent successor is found.
He was been visiting PlayStation first-party studios for the last several months and has stated he wants Sony to improve the profit margins for the PlayStation division.
Ryan joined Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (later renamed to Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe) in 1994 and has since held multiple senior positions including the President of SIEE, the head of Global Sales and Marketing at SIE and Deputy President of SIE since January 2018, before being promoted to SIE President and CEO.
"After 30 years, I have made the decision to retire from SIE in March 2024," said Ryan in September 2023 in a statement when he announced he would be leaving the company. "I’ve relished the opportunity to have a job I love in a very special company, working with great people and incredible partners. But I’ve found it increasingly difficult to reconcile living in Europe and working in North America.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Weird, and potentially concerning, that Sony hasn't been able find someone to fill the position permanently. It's not like Jim Ryan retired out of the blue. He announced this a while ago. There should have been a succession plan in place that would allow someone to step up if Jim Ryan got hit by a bus. At the very least, they should have had a way to fill the job when given several months notice.
"He announced this a while ago. "
They also announced that Hiroki Totoki would be taking over at the same time. It was always the plan for him to take over for some period of time.
Exactly. The company is probably eager to see what Horiki does in the interim. He may be a potential candidate himself.
So more live service, DLC, micro transactions etc. I am so glad I own zero modern day consoles.
“He… has stated he wants Sony to improve the profit margins for the PlayStation division.” yeah that’s not a great sign. Hopefully he remains a temporary interim…
That would also be the defacto mandate on any would be next CEO. PlayStation is impressive but it's profits margin are the worst of the big 3.
it has come to light during the FTC challenge :
https://gameranx.com/updates/id/476524/article/xboxs-data-suggests-they-might-have-a-better-profit-margin-than-playstation/
Xbox ~12% margins VS PlayStation ~7%
Certainly it has an impact along with :
1) using a still aggressive strategy with 3rd party exclusive content, trading short term profitability for maximized growth potential.
2) Still limited although expending pc support
3) Increase in budget/development time without a likewise expansion of there consumer base. (PS5 is tracking almost exactly like ps4 with few regional variability)
Ok I looked into this. Apparently it's not reliable in that you can't compare them to each other because each company has a different way of doing their accounting. For instance during that same trial Phil said to the Judge that their profits were in single digits not double, which contradicts the graph. There's a large thread at restera where people talked about it when it was released. It's also very weird how they use different verbiage for each company at the top of the graph bar. MS is the only one listed as having an accountability margin while none of that is said for Nintendo or Sony's graph. Also Sony spread out the purchase of Bungie across multiple quarters. Which is still being applied. I think last quarter was the last payment so next quarter their margins will rise.
I'm not expecting it to be 100% accurate either as it is only MS internal assessment. But I'm not expecting more accurate info from Restera either. The bottom line this piece was entered as evidence during the trial If Sony wanted to set the record straight they had all the opportunity to do so and now it's been multiple times this year that Sony stated to be working on increasing their profit margins.
With Sony's brand power, their margins should be a lot more like that of Nintendo and it's not unreasonable to think shareholders would demand better ROI to witch any CEO would work to satisfy.
Well look at this way. The PS5 is performing so well that they didn't even need to spend hundreds of millions developing a PS5 pro, but they did for some reason or another. They like being the best clearly, and that can't just be for funsies. They think the investment will be worth it obviously
I would not read too much into PS5 pro strategy regarding ROI. For all we know Sony might just intend to maximize profits out of it and sell it as a premium device, maybe way more so than they did with the PS4 Pro especially since reportedly Xbox will not be competing again in this segment.
