Shawn Layden, head of North American PlayStation business.
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Sony’s North American PlayStation chief on PS4’s dominance, 1-year anniversary, and GamerGate (interview)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 15 min

Shawn Layden took over as president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America seven months ago. Replacing longtime head Jack Tretton, Layden has been responsible for the sales of the PlayStation 4, which recently celebrated its one-year anniversary.

Sony said Friday that it has sold 13.5 million units of the PS4 in the past year, significantly more than the 10 million Xbox Ones claimed by Microsoft during the past year. Sony also released other interesting stats: PlayStation Plus, the subscription-based online program, now has 7.9 million paying members; Sony has more than 56 million unique active users; they’ve played a billion hours on the PS4 online; and they have pushed the Share button on the PS4 more than 530 million times.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.