The end of this month marks a time of big change for PlayStation. After 27 years at the company and 5 years as CEO of Sony's US gaming division, current boss Jim Ryan is leaving. During his tenure, PlayStation not only went through some good moments, but also a number of controversial ones that made Ryan a somewhat unpopular leader. In this shorter thematic video, we take a quick look at history and evaluate Ryan's work in the field of this now not only console giant and what his departure may mean for the future.
On April 1, 2019, Jim Ryan took over as CEO Sony Interactive Entertainment after its predecessor, John Koder. He took up his position a year before the release of the then-next-gen PlayStation 5 console at the time when the Covid-19 pandemic began. Ryan already had a tough job. Not only did he have to handle the global release of a brand new console, but he also had to make sure the launch was as smooth as possible. Despite the fact that the PS5 console was in short supply due to the demanding production, the release of the console was more or less successful despite a slower start.
Even then, however, Jim Ryan wasn't carrying the most positive sentiment over his head. This, for example, due to his statement from 2017, in which he spoke negatively about backward compatibility and did not believe, that it would be any popular feature of the then-current PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 5 did eventually include backwards compatibility—probably a decision Jim Ryan didn't sign off on—but support was only native to PS4 titles. And not quite yet; for example due to not being able to play on the DualSense controller even though it doesn't lack any key features that PS4 games might require. Backward compatibility of a limited library of games from previous PlayStations was then locked behind the highest level PS Plus subscription.
Even that underwent significant changes under Ryan. One subscription became three levels, which offers progressively more benefits, including, for example, Ubisoft+ Classic, trial versions of new games or cloud streaming. Changing how PS+ works, including increasing the price by a third, was another very unpopular move. Of course, it's hard to blame Ryan personally, and the post-Covid situation, inflation and the overall market situation also played a big role. After all, the increase in the price of subscriptions affected more services.
However, Ryan was responsible for another series of decisions that the players did not like at all. In certain regions there was an increase in the price of the console PlayStation 5 and was also one of the people who in the larger they started pushing the $70 price tag for the game as a new standard. It was precisely under his leadership that more or less was published of the failed PlayStation VR2which also failed due to the fact that it is a closed ecosystem of an already small market, combined with a small number of games, which was further reduced by the fact that you cannot play games from the first generation on the PS VR2.