Former chairman and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Ken Kutaragi once said it was Sony’s goal to make players want to work more hours in order to afford a PS3, an expensive console that had yet to get officially slapped with its infamous $599.99 price tag. It’s an arrogant statement that set the tone for the console and led to multiple years of flailing and unforced errors. The console maker eventually recovered and said humility is undoubtedly responsible for the PS4’s success.
That more humble PlayStation is all but dead now.
In recent years, PlayStation has repeatedly shot itself in the foot, arm, hand, and numerous other parts of the body away from its vital organs. Even with its handful of great games, it has still found ways to embarrass itself. This doesn’t bode well for any company, especially one of the verge of launching a new console. PlayStation needs a wider change and that means Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst and SIE CEO Hideaki Nishino have to go.
Hulst and Nishino, admittedly, seized the reins when the ship was already in turbulent waters. They took control of SIE in June 2024 as Jim Ryan stepped down and became co-CEOs together (Nishino was then shifted to sole SIE CEO and Hulst was moved to Business Group CEO in 2025). Ryan’s tenure marked an unfortunate shift within PlayStation. Under the longtime Sony executive, PlayStation shifted its focus from single-player games to live service titles, which has been, to put it lightly, a huge failure.
Concord is the poster child of this initiative, but that multimillion dollar, record-setting flop is just a piece of the puzzle. PlayStation bought Bungie for a whopping $3.6 billion, a number some employees said was overblown by Bungie leadership. Bluepoint Games, Naughty Dog, Insomniac Games, Firesprite, Bungie, and Bend Studio (and perhaps Deviation Games, but it’s not clear what kind of shooter it was making) all wasted years and millions of dollars developing live service games that didn’t come out. Layoffs also affected every single team there. Fairgame$ and Horizon Hunters Gathering, while not canceled (yet), have reportedly both received underwhelming feedback and have had to pivot.
Hulst and Nishino weren’t in charge for all of this chaos, but they were the head honchos for a lot of it. And before Hulst was SIE Studio Business Group CEO, he was CEO of PlayStation Studios for around five years, so it wasn’t like didn’t have any power before his 2024 promotion. He oversaw the destruction of some of these teams and seemingly didn’t change course fast enough.
Pivoting away from what made the PS4 such a killer console was always going to be a bad idea, especially since it revolved around turning single-player studios into multiplayer ones. They are different skill sets, and that incompatibility proved fatal for many. No one heeded the warnings of Marvel’s Avengers or Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. It’s reminiscent of the famous Arrested Development scene where noted goof Tobias Fünke explains how people delude themselves into thinking open relationships will work for them before admitting that he thinks such an arrangement will work for him. The topic may be live service games here, but the naive misbelief is the same.
Buying studios, encouraging them to make games they are not suited for, and then closing them down reeks of awful leadership, especially when it’s in pursuit of a longshot that’s becoming longer by the day. But it goes beyond that. PlayStation has been implementing dynamic pricing on the PlayStation Store. It’s killing physical media by 2028 and shutting down the PS3 and Vita storefronts. And even though some of this is due to a cruel, pointless war and idiotic tariffs, the PlayStation has jacked up PS5 and PS5 Pro prices multiple times over the past couple years.
All of this is terrible — that has to be emphasized — but PlayStation’s recent attempt to cancel Kojima Productions’ upcoming stealth game Physint is probably the biggest symbol of its poor leadership. Kojima Productions has helped define almost every PlayStation system. Metal Gear Solid is one of the most beloved and groundbreaking games on the PS1. Its next two sequels were among the most acclaimed titles on the PS2. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots gave the PS3 a lifeline when it needed it most, something the recent remaster made even more clear. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker were among the PSP’s strongest titles. Death Stranding gave the PS4 one of its most unique games, while its divisive sequel became one of the more notable PS5 console exclusives. The PlayStation Vita didn’t get a KojiPro game and look how that turned out.
PlayStation’s terrible official response to this only makes it all worse. It noted that the team continues to “have great admiration for Hideo Kojima’s vision for the game” and their “relationship remains strong after three decades of industry-leading, genre-defining creative cooperation.” It’s almost impossible to read without immediately noticing the contradiction. It’s strange to “admire” a game but then try to can it and also claim it still has a strong relationship with KojiPro when trampling on three decades of working together in order to cancel its next game.
Games get canceled all the time — and some probably for good reason — and it’s possible KojiPro missed milestones or otherwise messed up. A new Bloomberg report alleges as much, noting Kojima was slated to go over budget and had indeed missed milestones. But that doesn’t justify what PlayStation did. This partnership was likely born out of a desire for PlayStation to get Kojima to go back to what he’s most known for. Metal Gear was a lucrative game for PlayStation systems, and drawing on that nostalgia could be quite powerful. Kojima has a solid track record, too, so axing the deal reeks of distrust and, more importantly, short-term thinking.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach‘s estimated budget is said to be around $150 million to $200 million, and the franchise as a whole has “almost certainly broken even.” Physint would likely take a few more years to make, and those slim Death Stranding margins are likely not something PlayStation wants to tolerate any longer in this tighter economic climate, but impatience can’t be the driving force behind every decision. It desperately needs positive sentiment and funding the next Metal Gear-esque game by KojiPro is one way to get it. Instead, it seems like the soulless bean counters at PlayStation have won, likely damaging decades of good faith between the two entities. And PlayStation’s hasty decision now has only pushed a respected creator in the hands of its biggest rival (one partially funded by blood money) and lost them likely an interesting game in the future.
If there’s one microcosm that could show the difference in approaches between the PS4 and PS5 generation, it’s this Kojima situation. Nearly a decade ago, PlayStation let KojiPro make a bizarre game where players walk around a wasteland with a baby in a jar and deliver packages and supported the team in the early days. And now, PlayStation tried to can a spiritual successor to one of the most iconic PlayStation-associated franchises.
It’s symbolic of the rot that has sunk into PlayStation’s top brass that can’t be in there at the start of the PS6. Even if a lot of this has come from straight from Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki, this upcoming generation (whenever it comes out) needs completely new leadership that understands the need for a publisher to not slavishly follow trends into depths of hell and piss off its players with almost every decision. PlayStation has to get back to having a more varied slate where it doesn’t just focus on massive blockbusters or push teams into making games they are not suited for. It may have sold around 95 million PS5s, and, while impressive, PlayStation seems to banking on that loyalty carrying it through the next generation. It’s a risky gambit, especially when it’s doing almost everything in its power to burn that loyalty it has spent years cultivating.
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