Shawn Layden quit Sony

@Silent_Buddha A lot of the stuff is just typical jerk behaviour, like nepotism. I've seen departments absorb other departments and when they eventually downsize the boss keeps all of their old people and gets rid of all of the people they absorbed, vs objectively looking at who should stay and who should go. I've seen managers with no reports, and no role other than sitting in on meetings because they're friends with their director. Lots of people that fail up because they have personal relationships with higher level management. The entire concept of their being a "power struggle" at a company like Sony is 100% believable. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but I guarantee it happens. Example, at my company two departments were fighting over the same project, and then end result was one vp with more clout absorbing the other department and stripping it down to nothing. Typically we call things like that "empire building." I don't know what people in other companies call it, but I'm sure they have a lot of different ways to describe office politics.

 

Huh, I've never seen that business cultural shift be atributed specifically to Harvard, nor that it was a deliberate choice coming from professors. Do you have a good source you can point me to to learn more about that story?

 

The idea that corporations should be focusing exclusively at profitability was fed with Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of thought which later spread to the rest of the Business schools. I must say that this man has done terrible harm in the way businesses work in societies, because he gave subjective and destructive ideas a "scientific" credibility that does not exist. It was a highly desirable idea for businessmen and politicians that wanted to remove accountability from them and fill their pockets without having to deal with consequences.This artificial credibility was then propagandized to the public to be accepting.

 

I wish I could remember the guys name. He's pretty famous and there was a lot of articles written about how the academic business world (including Harvard) were rejecting and reversing a lot of the changes to how Business management was taught at a college level. I'll have to see if I can remember his name or ask some of my colleagues. Pretty busy right now, so don't expect it soon.

That was not as all what Friedman was advocating or proposing. He was focused on the macro-economic problems of the world and nations in general and far less so on how businesses operated. While there is some room for debate and discussions, the most economically sound times in the world were when the US adhered to much (but not all) of his ideas.

When on the topic of business management, he was still of the opinion that if you take care of your customers first, your business has the best chance of success and profitability. The guy I'm trying to remember the name of (from my response to Milk), was diametrically opposed to this claiming that while it had some importance, it was relatively minor compared to the overall profitability of a business. And that if a company was considered profitable (by Wall St. investment standards) then consumers would benefit. This has proven to be patently false, but as lots of people made a lot of money since then, business schools were loathe to change things (lots of money coming in from those Alumni). Only now that there is so much data on how this is harmful for not only overall business health, but as a result national economic health have we seen some change in this.

I suspect this may quickly devolve to RPSC type banter, so that'll be the last I say on this.

Regards,
SB

 

I would not be surprised if the new Wired interview/article about the PS5 was released to diverge the public attention from this.

 

Actually what Milton Friedman advocated is far worse. He supported that businesses main responsibility is to maximize shareholder value and nothing else, that shareholders should make the decisions about how the business should function, and assumed this automatically serves the best interests of the business and the economy. This is an idea that is completely out of touch and it is unbelievable that it gained so much support. It is called the shareholder theory. This idea has been indeed adopted by Harvard

Many companies including many from the gaming industry have shareholders that barely know much the products or use the products the companies produce, and in other cases their decisions although potentially maximize profits they go towards the opposite direction of the utility of the customer. So for example although the microtransaction model makes sense for cheap casual games like mobile games and such to some extend (it is the main source of revenue apart from ads) they are unnecessary in the console market. Companies can profit without them, yet they are a newly discovered source of profit maximization against the benefit maximization of the consumer. They will push for it until it becomes the standard including subscription models. When a customer is so in "love" with a product therefore replays it as much as he wants with no additional cost, it is seen by shareholders as an opportunity to charge extra for it.

 

The rest of this conversation needs to go to RSPC. Nothing to add here until we get some more info on Shawn's leaving.

 

Wired interview was a week later.

Also by all looks of it, Wired interviews are timed together with waves of hardware deployments to devs. This time they started sending new gamepads, and then they focused much of their interview on that part of the console.

 

Replaced by head of Guerilla Games, Herman Hulst.

A surprising move as Hulst is not a Sony exec. Could be good or bad - different skillset and requirements overseeing 15 studios all with their bosses versus your studio and its game.

 

Hmmm. Given the Decima engine is cross platform, and Hulst oversaw that, and now he's in charge of Sony's game studios, is there some consideration towards PC games? Sony have spoken about that, creating very large games, and given these games' incredible monetisation, it'd be a stupid market to overlook. So, perhaps, have the single-player experiences console specific, but the multiplayer games platform agnostic. Have HZD2 a PS5 showcase to shift units, but the HZD Battle Royale with ridable robot dinosaurs running on every platform under the sun with 70 million players all wanting to win an exclusive hat for their Thunderjaw to match their paid-for purple dino-booties.

 

If you look back at Sony's appointments within PlayStation over the last 10-15 years, including folks like Andrew House (who started in PR), many of them came up through the ranks. Guerrilla is a big studio so much of what Herman Hulst has been doing for years would be leadership and management, i.e. he wasn't the game director for Horizon Zero Dawn (Mathijs de Jonge) or Killzone 3 (Steven ter Heide).

If Sony had appointed Neil Druckmann as the head of WWS, you could say that was an odd move, but Herman Hulst looks like a good fit given his almost-two-decades of experience. Instead of overseeing the operation of one of Sony's studios, he now oversees them all. It's one, albeit large, step up the corporate hierarchy.

edit: also Head of WWS is not an executive position, Jim Ryan's post is.

 

Shawn seems good...

 

Oh, okay. That wasn't made clear. Straight-forward promotion then.

 

Not that lol. But Dreams could fit very well on PC.

 

Is Cerny the only principal actor left from the PS4 launch?

 

Shuhei Yoshida? He was around during the PS4 launch, now he is focusing on independent games for PS5. Unless I'm missing something...

 

John Kodera (1992) and Jim Ryan (1994) have both been with Sony for decades. The role-swap Sony undertook back in February, with Kodera as President and Ryan and Deputy President playing music chairs looked weird but in retrospect I think it makes sense. John Kodera oversaw the transition of network services from PS3 (awful) to PS4 (better) and Sony are evidently planning ahead for a network/streaming-heavy and Kodera has the experience. It's arguably the more important role and he's probably paid as much, if not more more than Jim Ryan.

All of the key people involved with launching with PS4 were long-standing Sony people in new roles. All of the people involved with launching PS5 are long-standing Sony people in new roles. You've not heard of them because you were so used to seeing Andrew House, Jack Tretton and the community-focussed folks like Adam Boyes.