Falling, yes, and what I said was pretty clear and within context:
Pointing out fingers to someone because they think Jim Ryan is the best PS CEO ever.
Numbers posted this quarter comparing to the previous year:
This fiscal year they are outperforming the previous one in all areas. In some quarter may not improve same same one of the previous year a few specific areas, but that's all.
Overall they are performing better than in previous years in total revenue, hardware sales (both revenue and units), accesories sales, software sales, game subs revenue, games sold outside PS, MAU. While also getting more assets and inventory, grew their studios and acquired more. These are not opinions, they are facts.
They may miss their consoles sales estimate in units but that doesn't mean they are failing, they outperformed last year and launch aligned are only under 3M below PS4.
Lower profitability comes mainly from things like costs from previous acquisitions, rising prices of components, currency exchange, game development costs being higher than ever due to working in more and bigger games than ever, having grown all their teams, and many of these projects still aren't released etc. Some of these things should ease the next year with several acquisition costs being aleady paid and several games (specially Helldivers 2 and Concord) being released.
First party sold less during Q2 and Q3 this year because this year they had Spider-Man 2 while in the previous one they had HFW+GT7+GoWR. Helldivers 2 in Q4 pretty likely will more than compensate that for the whole FY.
So yes, even if a few things are temporally down, the numbers factually say SIE is performing better than ever. Meaning, Jim Ryan is the most successful gaming CEO any console maker ever had. In fact, some quarters are even topping Tencent as the top grossing gaming company in the world (now and in gaming history).
There was no Playstation CEO. Does that answer your question? Sony's corporate structure was an absolute mess, with studios reporting to different entities globally, some overseen by SCE Worldwide Studios, others by SCEA, others by SCEE (Jim Ryan was the CEO of SCEE by 2012).
I will not entertain your crap anymore, if you cannot read and can't put more than 30 seconds in interpreting text, that's not my problem.
The PlayStation CEO is the SIE CEO. SIE was previosly known as SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment).
SIE/SCE has a subsidiary (now two, adding Bungie) in charge of all their first and 2nd party games, PS Studios. Previously known as SIE Worldwide Studios or SCE Worldwide Studios, all their internal studios always reported to there (now with the exception of Bungie, who reports directly to SIE / SIE publishing).
SIE also has regional subdiaries in charge of region specific retail sales, distribution, marketing, CM, customer support etc. as SIEE, SIEA, SIEJ etc., previously known as SCEE, SCEA, SCEJ etc. Game development studios never reported to them, they reported to PS Studios / Worldwide studios.
Since the start these regional divisions were competing against each other and fighting each other (with the European one being the most successfuul) and having different marketing strategies and campaigns, until when with Jim Ryan as SIE CEO and Eric Lempel as SIE head of marketing decided to switch to an Apple-like approach of having a single global mission, messaging with global campaigns that would be localized and implemented in a coordinated way by each regional subsidiary. Now they would support each other instead of competing, and since they avoid redundancies now are much more productive, effective and profitable.
They did the same with 1st and 2nd party publishing, 3rd party relations, localization or customer support: now they have a single global team with presence in all regions for each thing where they share resources and help each other following a single and coordinated global strategy. Before Jimbo each region did their own thing, some work had to be done 3 or 4 times, etc.
How many studios were closed under him as CEO? Studio Liverpool was closed in 2012. Nice spin
Who was the PS CEO back then when Liverpool and Evolution studios were closed?
Studios closed under his watch both overseeing SCE Europe and SIE
- Bigbig studios
- Evolution Studios
- Guerrilla Cambridge
- Japan Studio
- Manchester Studio
- PixelOpus
- Studio Liverpool
The regional SIE marketing and sales divisions like SCEE have nothing to do with the gamedev studios. Dev studios report to PS Studios (back then known as Worldwide Studios), no to the regional divisions.
The CEO of SIE and PS Studios are the ones who acquire or shut down studios, not the ones of the regional subsidiaries who mainly handled marketing and sales to retailers.
In April 2012 Kaz Hirai was replaced by Andrew House as SIE (back then SCE) CEO. Liverpool Studio closure was announced in August 2012 with Andrew House as CEO of SCE and Shuhei Yoshida in charge of PS Studios (now Worldwide Studios). So Andrew House and Yoshida closed Liverpool Studio.
In 2021 Jim Ryan and Hermen Hulst "resurrected" Liverpool Studio, Evolution and Bizarre Creations acquiring Firesprite since it has most of the still active (some should have retired due to age) key talent of these studios.
During the Jim Ryan era they only closed Pixel Opus, even if they were around a dozen people and didn't have their own office, they were in a shared office and were part of an incubation program.
Japan Studio wasn't shut down, they branched out Japan Studio's XDEV 2nd party team to have their own office (a bigger one in the same building, where they are growing because they are in charge of the whole Asia and not only Japan) and stop reporting to a local gamedev team, as in the past did the European XDEV team branching out from Liverpool Studio and the NA XDEV team branching out from Santa Monica. These 3 teams are now part of the global XDEV team.
The different internal development Japan Studio ones were merged into their most successful one: Team Asobi. That team became the only one in the Japan Studio, and with the restructuring the heads of the team now were heads of the studio. So Japan Studio got rebranded to Team Asobi. They were moved of the same building to a bigger office where they are growing.
Wasn't that strong in Europe when PS3 launched, yes. It was an uphill battler there during PS3 era. That's a fact
PS3, PSP and Vita performed very well in Europe compared to the other regions. Specially during the early 599€ days.
Launch aligned PS3 destroyed Xbox 360 specially in Europe, the difference is that PS3 got released in EU almost 2 years after 360.
