Shawn Layden quit Sony

He's there, but in a dramatically reduced role. I'm talking about the absolute top of the chain. The people who were running the show then that are still running the show now.

 

Out of curiosity over the apparent hierarchical shift down, and disappointment given that he's been a key steward since the PS3, I wondered about Shuhei Yoshida's age. He's 55 now.

So I'm less disappointed and more pleased for him. To me, that seems less like some sort of demotion and more of a shift into doing something less stressful and more creatively fulfilling. Maybe more time with his family too. Exactly what I'd do in my fifties. Maybe my forties.

 

Yes it's obvious he wanted that job. Those last years he was mainly managing indies and PSVR anyways. Now he is doing that in an official position. From his tweets he seems really happy, like he got what he asked, and received congrats from most Playstation people.

 

Reduced or focussed? The person at the top of any organisation is not, or at least definitely should not, be making the decisions related to the implementation of a product. That's probably only ever really happened successfully during Steve Jobs second tenure at Apple. The person at the top is there to steer the whole ship in a direction and appoint trusted heads of key departments who report to them, and it's those department heads, and their teams, who make it happen and to decide how best to do that. The person at the top is there to provide clear leadership, allocate budgets an ensure the right resources are in the right place.

When PlayStation launched the two issues were the hardware and the game software but the technological landscape has expanded and so has expectations for CE living room devices so you need more people, or the same people but not with ever-expanding responsibilities. Spread people too thin and everything gets done badly. That's my take on what Sony has been doing with restructuring. Giving people less to worry about and more to focus on. That's how things get done right.

 

I don't really have any strong opinion on any of this nor was I trying to imply anything negative (or positive) about any management turnover. I was just asking the question since it appears that there will be different people pulling many of the levers this time and I don't have enough familiarity with the internal structure of SIE to know if that was an accurate perception.

 

Uh a few days ago I mentioned Yoshida-san in a tweet saying Asia was not on Playstation indie partner registration website (only Europe and America). He replied "thanks for the feedback"

Months ago I also mentioned to him the same thing and got no response.