Shawn Layden was, for a while, the public face of PlayStation, and fans came to love him. The executive, who had a long history at Sony bringing him from Europe to Japan, became a household name when he replaced Jack Tretton as head of Sony Computer Entertainment America. He would later become president of Worldwide Studios, before leaving in 2019.
In response to a Bloomberg report, which suggested today that PlayStation doubled the blockbusters and abandoned its more creative background, many have shared an old clip on social media in which Layden talks about Vib-Ribbon. The soliloquy effectively concludes that while the PS1 rhythm title wasn’t a big seller, “it wasn’t the point.”
Among enthusiasts, this has greatly affected and many express that they miss the executive on social media. It turns out that Layden, presumably with a lot of free time gardening leave, is reading all the comments and liking everything he sees. The generalist sentiment in many of the posts is that the current Chief Jim Ryan is bad and that the old Chief Layden was the GOAT.
Perhaps it is worth remembering, however, that Layden never held the highest positions on PlayStation; he was an important figure during his tenure, directing both Japanese and American weapons before taking control of Worldwide Studios, but he was never the CEO. And, in fact, the suit hinted at the organization’s transition to smaller but larger titles before it left.
“I think we’ve done a lot over the last three or four years to get to a place where we’re now building fewer games a year than ever before, but we’re spending more time, more energy, certainly more money, winning. “He told CNET in early 2019, before explaining the organizations'” first, best, obligatory “strategy.
We’ll probably never know what happened internally that led to Layden’s departure, and we also miss his passion for the industry, but attributing gigantic corporate decisions to a single person can be dangerous. We don’t know what PlayStation would look like with Layden still on top, but we’d risk it probably wouldn’t be too different from what we see today.