Although Jim Ryan continues to be the president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, there will be some significant changes within the leadership under him – no wonder: the new business year is starting next week.
Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE onwards) announced in a blog post that there are quite a few changes. Masayasu Ito was appointed Representative Director and Deputy President of SIE. He previously was the Development Director on the original PlayStation VR headset. Keep the PSVR in mind, it will pop up later, too.
Ito will be joined by Lin Tao as Director and Deputy President and Takeshi Shibata as Director. John (Tsuyoshi) Kodera, who was the successor to Andrew House (who became quite a popular figure in 2013, when he announced that the PlayStation 4 will cost 100 USD/EUR less than the Xbox One), hasn’t been more than a faceless figure, so it’s not surprising to hear that he’s leaving SIE to move to Sony Group. Hideaki Nishino has been promoted to become the senior vice president of Platform Experience, and he will „oversee Network Engineering and Operations, R&D, Design, Data Strategy and Operations in addition to having previously led managing Product and Platform development.” Recently, he has been involved in a lot of platform management, and he was the bearer of many announcements in recent months, including the PlayStation VR 2. See a pattern here?
Michael Pattinson (he is currently the vice president of Global Third-Party Relations) has been promoted to be the senior vice president of Platform Planning and Management. According to SIE, he „has been instrumental in building our current strong portfolio of business partnerships on PS4 and PS5 and has been a strong advocate for the Indie development community.”
So you can notice that several people involved with the PlayStation VR have been pushed up the ladder in the company, and the PlayStation VR 2 will not launch this year (Sony won’t go against its word, will it now?), so them saying that the PlayStation 5 won’t ignore virtual reality wasn’t just a fluff PR comment.
Source: PSU
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