Jim Ryan has shared what may be his final interview as CEO of PlayStation.
Jim has been CEO of PlayStation since 2019, overseeing the transition from PlayStation 4 to PlayStation 5. He was also made head of PlayStation during the difficult pandemic years, which for Sony, meant supply issues for their chips and PlayStation 5 consoles themselves.
Jim’s tenure with PlayStation has been considerably longer, of course. He started out in PlayStation Europe in 1994, all the way back from when Sony launched its gaming division. He oversaw the console’s wide adoption and mainstream success in Europe, taking on multiple roles through the years.
Jim’s tenure as PlayStation CEO was also defined by something that happened a little earlier than when he started. In 2016, Sony undertook a reorganization of their network and Playstation services, bringing them together and renaming Sony Computer Entertainment to Sony Interactive Entertainment.
That reorganization was overseen by Jim’s predecessor, Shawn Layden, and was only one of many such moves to restructure the business. When Shawn stepped down from being PlayStation CEO, and left Sony itself, it was speculated that he went through a power struggle with Jim. Shawn later stated that he chose to retire simply because he was tired of the job.
Jim shared similar sentiments in his pending retirement this March. In Jim’s retirement letter, he told the public that he had grown tired of having to travel between work in the US and his home in the UK.
Now, in his interview with Variety, Jim was surprisingly upbeat on what he admits was a difficult tenure. He says:
“I’m just so grateful that I didn’t work in a boring industry. It was my job to exude a sense of calm and serenity.
Actually, I was there at my dining-room table, head in my hands, wondering how we were going to do this.”
Jim also shed light on some of the specific problems he went through his tenure:
“We assemble the great majority of the PlayStations in China, and nobody could get in. Finishing games when developers couldn’t get together and eat pizza and brainstorm about their craft was another thing. And then, the not-unimportant task of selling our product to our consumers when retail was entirely closed.”
Ultimately, Jim says that he is “so proud of what the team achieved back in 2020.” That was the launch of the PlayStation 5, one of the most successful the industry has ever seen. It’s easy to forget this given what followed was a literal year or so of supply issues for the console, harming the transition between console generations. But Jim certainly made the most out of difficult situations to keep the lights on at PlayStation.
