One CEO Too Many - Hermen Hulst steps down as CEO of Sony
After a few months in the role of joint CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment alongside Platform Business Group leader Hideaki Nishino, it’s been announced that Hermen Hulst will be stepping down from the role.
Hopefully Hulst will be leading the next Helghast revolution.
This shake-up at the head of SIE comes via a blog post on Sony’s website. Hulst had only been appointed co-CEO with Nishino back in May of last year, after it was announced that then-CEO Jim Ryan, who had been with the company for 30 years of service. Starting June 1st, Hulst and Nishino took over in a partnership role to lead the company. Now it seems that even that was a temporary measure. Now Nishino will be taking over as President and sole CEO of SIE from April 1st of this year. But Hulst will be taking over the CEO position of the Studio Business Group where he will be heading up the first-party output of PlayStation’s gaming division. In this new role, Hulst will also oversee game development across PlayStation consoles and PC. It’s also been announced that part of bringing Sony’s legendary IPs to other mediums as part of PlayStation Production, meaning Hulst will decide which of Sony’s impressive backlog will get published as movies, TV shows, comics, and more.
Though it’s hard to be certain, this choice seems to have been made after the industry-shattering flop of Concord last summer, which lasted only two weeks up and running before Sony took it down to “re-evaluate” its potential. A few weeks after that, Sony officially pulled the plug and shuttered the development studio behind the release, Firewalk Studios. The release and subsequent de-release of Concord not only caused Sony to visit their other studios and start axing a number of live service games that were currently in development across various departments, but the effects rippled out to the industry as a whole. Though live service games are completely dead, publishers will be thinking twice before trying to release a live service game that might tank as badly as Concord. And maybe, just maybe, the industry will begin to heal.
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