A Huge Shake-Up In Sony's PlayStation Team Has Gamers Thinking About The Future

A key employee of Sony's PlayStation division has decided to retire. The 60-year-old Masayasu Ito took part and led many of PlayStation's most recognized and successful projects. Ito, now an executive vice president of Sony Interactive Entertainment and PlayStation hardware chief, will be retiring starting October 1, 2022. Seeing as Ito played a key role in the hugely successful PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles, can the company be the same without him? Fortunately, Sony seems to have a plan.

Sony announced Ito's upcoming departure in a brief press release. As Bloomberg noted, Ito is retiring after a successful career that spans five decades. He first joined the company in 1986 and stayed with it throughout all these years that led up to his retirement. His early positions involved in-car audio equipment, but once he moved to the console division in 2000, he remained there for the rest of his long career. And what a successful career it was — Ito personally oversaw the engineering of some of Sony's most popular products to date.

Ito led the engineering for the PlayStation 4, which sold over 117 million units (via Sony). Although the PS2 remains more successful with at least 155 million units sold, the PS4 continues to stay strong and remains one of the most popular modern-day consoles. Ito's endeavors go past the PS4: he has also worked on the creation of the PSVR headset and the PlayStation 4 Pro, not to mention Sony's latest PlayStation 5 console. Ito talked about the development of the PS5 console in a blog post back in 2020, after having spent five years working alongside his team of engineers designing and developing the device. 

Sony's plan for the PlayStation 5 console was to cut down on noise levels and improve the cooling, and those are just some of the things Ito contributed to. Unfortunately, the console continues to be plagued by supply issues, but Sony appears to have plans on how to fix that problem sometime soon.

According to Sony (reported by The Verge), the responsibility for the entire PlayStation platform continues to rest with Hideaki Nishino, a senior vice president at PlayStation, who reports directly to Jim Ryan, SIE president. This implies that no major changes should be happening to the console and Sony's entire gaming division, but it's certainly the end of an era with the departure of one of the giants who made it all happen up until now.