Hiroki Totoki becomes interim head of Sony Interactive Entertainment

Hiroki Totoki is taking over today as interim chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment, filling the role of former head Jim Ryan.

[Dandalandan117]

Hopefully lesser focus on live service games

[KyRo]

Hopefully just more of a focus on games in general. 4 years in I'm still waiting for something to wow me like Ratchet and Clank and Returnal.

[Cacabunga]

PlayStation will make or kill itself with gaas games.. we need the PlayStation from previous gens. It’s ok with gaas once in a while, just not change your whole vision and turn back to fans who made this brand what it is today..

[bloop]

More games would be great. This gen has been really disappointing so far. Great games have been too few and far between. And time to drop cross gen development for good.

[Crows90]

Wow...returnal...what a fantastic game. Demons souls was huge for me as I never got around to beating it the first time around.

[-Foxtrot]

Yeah hopefully

They have Helldivers for that, just focus on supporting that game as much as they can. Why oversaturate a market even more when you've just caught lightning in a bottle with a game already.

No point making more than one as it will just divide attention and player bases.

[LucasRuinedChildhood]

In the short term, I suppose we won't see any change.

I think they need to invest heavily in 2nd party games - we're seeing that a bit this year.

They can take more risks on those games (more unique) because they're not $200m+ and they can more quickly get out a variety of exclusives.

Helldivers shows how well that can pay off and probably Stellar Blade will as well. Returnal did too (Sony didn't own them).

Insomniac was in the top 3 best "PlayStation" studios decades before Sony ever owned them.

And if you think back on a year like 2015, none of the big exclusives were from first party studios (Until Dawn, Bloodborne, The Order 1886). Nobody saw that as a problem back then. We were happy.

People (even PS fans themselves) started acting like second party games are not "real" exclusives ever since Microsoft started buying up publishers and studios. People need to get over that. Buying up everything so people can chant "First party" and have list wars is not necessary or good for the industry. It's part of the reason Xbox have been forced to go multiplatform by Microsoft so that approach backfired.

If Sony's huge games are all going to take 5+ years to make, I think they need as many if not more second party games as they used to have.

[Einhander1972]

Helldivers 2 most successful live service launch of the year....

PlayStation doesn't make bad games, whatever they make live service or single player will be made to the highest standards.

[_Decadent_Descent]

Live service I agree with, but I would hope that doesn't mean less focus on MP games in general.

[Lightning77]

I dunno about about that. I think he's sticking to that regime and seeing it all the way through. The same way Ryan stuck with Shawn Laydens plans and regime. Backtracking now would cause tremendous stress on developers and developmental pipelines.

[Skuletor]

With the focus on live service games, I'm surprised The Last of Us II: Grounded or whatever and that Multiplayer Spider-Man got cancelled. I've read what Naughty Dog's excuse was but if Sony were truly focused on live service games, they could have hired more people, so ND could work on more than just the MP game

[DarXyde]

A bit worried.

As long as it's truly short term... Maybe it's fine...? But a CFO taking the reins is likely how creative passion goes to die.

[Chocoburger]

He needs to bring back Japan Studios and re-hire all that incredible talent that they lost. PlayStation needs to focus more on what made them incredible from PS1 to PS3 eras.

[Einhander1972]

This is misinformation Asobi was a team at Japan Studio, all that really happened is a name change of the studi.

Before the change even happened a few people (I think it was only 3-5 people) said they wanted to leave the studio to form an indie development studio "Bokeh Game Studio" which they did, and Bokeh is still making games for PlayStation just independently.

So at that time Sony changed the name from Japan Studio to Asobi, everyone from the staff except for a few people who left to form Bokeh stayed on under Asobi. Sony themselves called it a reorganization, which is accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

[Chocoburger]

Hmm, I guess its not as bad as it sounded, then? I'll read that wikipedia article to get all the details.

[Aphrodia]

I wonder if Playstation will ever be like it was from ps1-ps3 ever again. Explorative. Ps4 is when they became more iterative than innovative. PS5 continues the iterative trend. Unless they have something hiding away then the Ps5 generation will remain iterative. With GTA 6 coming relatively soon the whole world is waiting to see what comes of that than anything else. Unfortunately it seems like we'll have to wait for ps6 just to see if sony will do anything new, innovative, and daring. So far the PS5 remains the only Playstation console I've never owned.

[Chocoburger]

As dev time increases, budgets ballooning out of control, and advertising costs trying to get the general public to know your game exists in an over crowded market, publishers don't want to take risks anymore.

I understand why companies have changed, but due to their changes in priorities, my focus has been on older generations these days.

[Travesty]

Okie dokie Hiroki Totoki. Get someone in there that loves the brand and listens to gamers. I kind of miss that reaction in the past.

[Charlieboy333]

Don't fuck it up

[CantThinkOfAUsername]

Great. This guy wants more PC ports. No point in releasing games 2-4 years later at full price after the FOMO and hype are all gone.

[Obscure_Observer]

Congrats Hiroki Totoki

[Pyrofire95]

I really hope it's someone like Shawn Layden stepping in. Someone who's not only focused on 4+ year cycles of massive games. Shorter games are great too and shouldn't take the better part of a console generation to make.

[Asterphoenix]

Hope they start using some PS1/PS2 Sony JP IP Games again. Fix the classics games/emulator on PSN for PS4/PS5 and put an effort of putting some games such as Xenogears and Xenosaga which wasn't released in EU/Oceania back in the PS1/PS2 days.

[REDDURT]

The price won’t allow that. The price drops and competition was real then but now it’s not the same because there are 3 different views on what to do to move forward.

[Zenzuu]

Hopefully lesser live service games, and continued push for decent single player IP's.