Why PlayStation Quickly Doubled Back on Its Two-CEO Model

variety.com:

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer PlayStation has a new CEO again — kind of. On Tuesday evening in the U.S. and the early hours of Wednesday in Tokyo, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced that Hideaki Nishino would be the sole CEO of the video game company, following less than a year of serving as CEO alongside Hermen Hulst.

At the time the two were appointed as dual successors to former PlayStation chief Jim Ryan in May 2024, Sony touted its faith in the dual CEO (not co-CEO) model, with Nishino overseeing business and platform operations and Hulst heading up the studio and development side.

Now the company is backtracking on that strategy, and PlayStation consumers and the company’s competitors are left wondering why. “When you see this, and you see new management throughout Xbox as well, there’s a lot of transition there.

A lot of senior people from large game companies are taking jobs elsewhere, taking roles at toy companies and non-endemic firms that are sort of adjacent to games,” games industry analyst and NYU Stern School of Business professor Joost van Dreunen tells Variety. “So there’s a bit of a musical chairs going around the industry at the very high level.