SCEI CEO to "Retire" From Executive Position at Sony

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/070426e.pdf

I put retire in quotes since it is possible he may have been "forced" out. It seems like Howard Stringer and Kutaragi were always at odds, and perhaps Sony no longer likes the direction Kutaragi was taking the PlayStation business (or they like it less than they did before).

I'm guessing Sony will take a different approach in the future (mostly with the PS4 I guess), which is a bit of disappointment to me. Kutaragi is a little crazy (OK, very crazy), but I liked his philosophies on hardware design and some other things. He certainly helped Sony make a lot of profit (not only from the SCEI division, but also from their consumer electronics division due to some of his decisions).

Looks like J Allard may have gotten his wish.

 

SCEA is and has always been a division of SCEI (Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.). You also have SCEE (Europe) and SCEJ (Japan...although it might as well be SCEI since the HQ is there). Kutaragi was CEO of SCEI, so there wasn't any mention of SCEA.

The former CEO of SCEA is replacing Kutaragi if you aren't familiar with the name in the article. I don't particularly care for him, although to be fair, I guess he hasn't had much power to make any decisions. He's actually been quiet during these last 6+ months.

Their software efforts are nice too, at least regarding what they can control (Sony arguably has the best 1st party of the 3). Although thanks to Kutaragi's dreams for hardware, their development tools have always been a little lacking to say the least. There is a lot of processing power in these systems, but it is a absolute pain to actually extract that power and use it to make better games. That's not exactly a good way to persuade 3rd parties to develop for your system, especially when you're main competitor does offer great development tools and support.