Sony Interactive Entertainment’s (SIE) upcoming chairman, Hiroki Totoki, has teased that the company will reveal its upcoming plans for the future later this month May 2024. As published on SIE’s official site, Totoki shared Hideaki Nishino will be appointed as the CEO of SIE’s Platform Business Group. At the same time, Hermen Hulst, the former game director at Guerilla Games and the current Head of PlayStation Studios, will be SIE’s Studio Business Group CEO. Hulst and Totoki-san will effectively start their new responsibilities on June 1, 2024.
Totoki-san has shared that we will expect to “learn more about the long-term vision for Sony Group and the essential role SIE plays in that vision” from the open letter SIE posted on their official site. “As I mentioned previously, FY24 marks the start of the Mid-Range Plan period for Sony Group in which we will set the course for sustainable growth.”
It is crucial for Totoki-san to pave the way for the future of SIE in the coming years, as the PlayStation 5 console is already halfway through its life cycle. Everyone is waiting for the huge announcement of its mid-generation refresh with its PlayStation 5 Pro, which will probably be announced during PlayStation’s upcoming showcase later this month.
In other news, Ghost of Tsushima’s PC port has been delisted from countries PSN does not support. Users who have pre-ordered the game have allegedly been refunded; most users have shared this on X/Twitter. This PSN-account linking issue has been attributed to Arrowhead’s critically acclaimed Helldivers 2, where Sony has enforced a policy that players must link their Steam accounts to their PSN accounts to continue playing the game, which then followed with the delisting of Helldivers 2 in regions where PSN isn’t available. However, the entire Helldivers 2 community went against the account linking requirement, resulting in a massive review bombing on Steam. Sony has then decided not to push with the account linking requirement after reviewing the bombing incident.
As of today, the Helldivers 2 Steam page has since recovered its positive reviews; however, it’s important to note that Sony has yet to make the game available to those regions where the game has been made unavailable for purchase.