thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
With my tinfoil hat on, and perhaps some misplaced hopes. Between all the internal moves we’ve been seeing at Sony (and across the wider industry), it feels like there is a major realignment away from GAAS. There’s been increasing public rejection, with a graveyard of large scale flops, whilst the big hits are straight up single player games. For Sony I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of this activity is gutting of people intimately tied to Sonys big pivot to GAAS.
This is what I feel is the case, too. From what I understand, she's been with Sony since 1989, so she was there since the PS1. Her retiring having put in 30+ years of work is absolutely likely.
But it doesn't mean things are mutually exclusive. She could be retiring simply to retire, while also retiring on some suggestion that maybe things resulting from the internal pivot to prioritizing GaaS (or maybe even the PC porting strategy) haven't quite worked out. Maybe Sony wants to adjust their focus better. Yes some of this is also my own personal thoughts and wishes at play, there's a bit of emotion in reading the news. Really though, EVERYONE'S analysis is going to involve a bit of an emotional read, we're human beings at the end of the day not machines.
So she could both be retiring because they're at the point career-wise that retirement is the best option, and stepping aside because Sony have decided to heavily adjust their various strategies regarding GaaS, PC, 3P partnerships/M&As/investments, marketing/advertising etc. Both things can be true simultaneously, and can even hold true for others who are retiring like Jim Ryan.
For now though, it's really just all speculation and it's safest to just assume they are retiring because they're a point where retirement seems like the obvious choice.
Jaffe always mentioned Connie Booth and Scott Rhode as the best execs and the enablers of the incredible projects done at Playstation, you know, the kind of people Microsoft needs to run their studios.
NGL if she ends up at Xbox it's gonna look a bit spooky for Sony, because I'm assuming she is retiring.
However it also will show just how absolutely awful Microsoft's corporate tactics truly are; remember they wanted an audit of Sony's upper management executives at SIE by the FTC during the ABK acquisition court hearings? Something like...access to performance reviews of those executives? I 'member that.
Which BTW was in addition to wanting a full roadmap of Sony's 1P and 3P exclusive software for the next 10 years. Now ask yourself what the fuk would Microsoft need that kind of information for just to get approval for buying ABK? That's the point: they didn't need it for ABK, they wanted it for poaching talent because they don't really have plants at SIE the way they did with Ybarra at ABK, for example.
I guess we'll see what happens but hey, if she or even someone like Jim Ryan shows up at Xbox, even if these are otherwise like 0.001% probability of happening odds...just look back here know the slimy way it probably happened.
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