Thank you for confirming what I've been concerned about for years
GamesBeat:In the game business, Sony was becoming much more global at the time. It wasn’t as focused on Japan. The decision-making became more global.
Yoshida: Absolutely. That process started in the Andrew House days. Jim Ryan kind of completed it. There was still a transition going on in some ways, but it was pretty much complete. It was a long process. More than five years. Bit by bit. Worldwide Studios was the exception. We were already global in 2005, but all the other parts of the company were divided. Each publisher had to send in three different masters to release games around the world.
Under Jim Ryan, the organization–he removed the individual headquarters. There was no more SCEA. Shawn Layden lost that job. There was no SCE Europe or SCE Japan. He reorganized everything into function-based groups. Global marketing, global sales, global third party, global PR. All the parts of the company became global. It was headquartered in the United States. Jim Ryan was in London, but it was a U.S.-based company. In Japan all the different groups reported to the U.S. or Europe.
GamesBeat: Did that make communication more difficult at first?
Yoshida: The implementation of that globalization was different for each function. The leaders of each different group–one group might treat Japan like a local regional office. The decisions would be made in the U.S. or Europe and later the people in Japan would learn about it. They wouldn’t know what the company was doing. But other groups integrated Japan and treated everyone in the U.S., Japan, or Europe the same. Anyone who could do the job best was assigned a global role. Global manager of this function might be in Japan or in London. A manager in Japan would be fully integrated with the headquarters discussions for that function. It was different for different functions.
