PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan is stepping down in 2024

Ryan announced his retirement after three decades with the company

Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO and PlayStation head Jim Ryan is leaving the company after four years in the role and 30 with SIE more broadly. The news first appeared in a short report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, based on a staff email Ryan sent to PlayStation employees on Sep. 27, 2023, where he said he plans to retire in March 2024. PlayStation officially announced the news shortly afterward in a press release.

“I will leave having been privileged to have a job that I love in a very special company working with great people,” Ryan said in the email.

"I absolutely love SIE and our community, but of late I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to strike the right balance between having my home in the UK and my job in the United States," he said in Sony's official statement.

“Jim Ryan has been an inspirational leader throughout his entire period with us, but never more so than in overseeing the launch of PlayStation 5 in the midst of the global COVID pandemic,” Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida said in a statement. “That extraordinary achievement made by the entire SIE team has been steadily built on and PlayStation 5 is on track to become SIE’s most successful console yet.”

Sony Interactive Entertainment

“We have discussed intensively and have determined the new management structure. We aim to achieve Sony Group’s further evolution and growth through bringing even greater success to the Game & Network Services Business.”

Hiroki Totoki, currently CFO of Sony Group, will act as interim CEO while SIE looks for a new, permanent replacement.

Ryan has been part of Sony in some capacity for 30 years and became company CEO in 2019, following John Kodera’s two-year stint in the role and Andrew Houser’s six-year term before that. He led PlayStation in a period of expansion at the end of the PS4 era, overseeing the acquisition of Spider-Man 2 maker Insomniac, Returnal studio Housemarque, and, more recently, Bungie, the team behind Destiny.

SIE also launched PlayStation productions during his tenure as CEO, a television and film studio committed to adapting PlayStation franchises, including The Last of Us on HBO and the Uncharted and Gran Turismo movies.

More recently, Ryan made headlines for comments made during the Xbox Activision trials, where he called Game Pass a value disaster and faced accusations of misleading European commissioners about the acquisition.