Management changes don’t happen often at the big video game consolemakers. But when somebody shakes the trees, the apples fall out. On Monday, one of Sony’s princes, Phil Harrison, resigned as head of Sony’s worldwide game studios, precipitating uncertainty in the games development community. Harrison, pictured below, was a 15-year Sony veteran.
Small and large game developers and publishers will view these developments with a combination of alarm and reassurance. Competitors will no doubt delight in the uncertainty the changes will create for Sony, which is losing its throne as the dominant force of the video game industry.
There’s no replacement for Harrison, other than his boss, Kaz Hirai, who runs the overall Sony Computer Entertainment business. Hirai, Harrison, Andrew House, the current chief marketing officer of Sony, and current Sony U.S. games chief Jack Tretton were the four horsemen who ran roughshod over Nintendo in the U.S. market for a decade.
Harrison is the British-born executive who has played key roles at Sony since the inception of the PlayStation business. He was around almost as long in the games division as Ken Kutaragi, who retired last year after failing to get the job as CEO of Sony Corp.
Harrison was critical at patching together the teams that Sony either grew organically or acquired over the years. He was the one who built the staff up to more than 2,000 in-house game developers. By comparison, Microsoft has just 1,000 game developers internally.
He was also a great spokesman for Sony, always delighting in showing off leading-edge video game technologies such as Sony’s EyeToy (camera control technology) in important keynote speeches at the Game Developers Conference or Sony’s press conferences at the E3 trade show.
Last year at the GDC, he introduced the concept of Home, the virtual world layered upon the PlayStation 3’s PlayStation Network.
Sony has made other changes, too. On Monday night, Sony’s U.S. game division, Sony Computer Entertainment America, announced it had hired former Eidos U.S. chief Rob Dyer to become its senior vice president for publisher relations. (Sony also made a couple of vice president appointments.)
That means Dyer is the guy who has to convince Sony’s partners to invest heavily in making games for Sony’s platforms, including the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable.
Both are struggling to get the attention of developers. The PS 3 is expensive to develop games for and has sold fewer units than either the Xbox 360 or the Nintendo Wii. The PSP is also more costly to develop for than the Nintendo DS, and the DS has outsold the PSP more than 2 to 1. That means it’s riskier for games developers to develop for the Sony platform than for someone else’s — a big change from just a few years ago.
Sony looked long and hard for the head of publisher relations in the U.S. The search took time. But apparently, what Sony gains in Dyer, it loses with Harrison. Dyer was previously the head of Crave Entertainment Group, one of the industry’s smaller publishers, and previously he ran Eidos in the glory days of Tomb Raider.
Dyer’s job isn’t going to get a lot easier if developers lack confidence in Sony. And losing someone like Harrison, and then not replacing him readily, does not inspire confidence. The task of convincing people to support a struggling platform is like trying to save a dying ecosystem. It’s an uphill battle. Sony has tremendous resources and the reassurance of the Blu-ray next-generation DVD disk’s victory over HD DVD behind it. It has to use those resources to win back game developers.
Game developers, a wise man once told me, are like canaries in the coal mine. When they start leaving your platform, you’re in trouble. That’s why Dyer’s job is a critical one. Harrison didn’t say where he was going. Hopefully, Sony’s game division knows where it has to go. Dyer is a great addition. But I think it is very late for Sony to fill this post in the middle of the console cycle. The uncertainty will continue.