Sony President Hiroki Totoki officially takes up the interim CEO of PlayStation.

On April 2, it was announced that Sony Group President, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki officially took over as the interim CEO of the PlayStation department today.

Back in September 2023, Sony announced that then-CEO Jim Ryan would leave on April 1, 2024, and be succeeded by Hiroki Totoki. Currently, Jim Ryan has officially left, and Hiroki Totoki will be responsible for overseeing the PlayStation department while continuing to hold his current positions at Sony Group until a longer-term successor is found for it.

In a statement at the time, Sony said, “Hiroki Totoki will work closely with Sony Group Corporation Chairman and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida and the SIE management team to define a new chapter in the future development of PlayStation, including the selection of the successor to the SIE CEO.”

Although Hiroki Totoki’s interim CEO tenure only officially begins today, he has already started visiting game studios in recent months and has put forward his own views on Sony’s game strategy.

In the Q&A session after Sony released its latest financial report in February this year, Totoki Hiroki expressed the hope that Sony will adopt a “positive” strategy in improving the profit margin of the game department, and part of the way to achieve this goal is to pay more attention to getting first-party games on the PC platform.

In response to the question of the increase in revenue of the game department but no increase in profit, Totoki Hiroki explicitly stated that he believes that the release of “cross-platform” games is still the way forward.

“In the past, we wanted to promote the console, and the primary purpose of first-party games was to make the console popular,” he explained. “That’s right, but there are synergies here. If you have strong first-party content – not only on our console, but also on other platforms like computers – then first-party games can grow and thrive through cross-platform, which can help increase operating profit, so this is another aspect we want to work on actively. I personally think there is room for improvement in terms of profit margin, so I want to actively improve our profit performance.”