You can now own a digital bobblehead of the man that laid off 900 people at PlayStation before he retired
Ah yes, exactly what I wanted!
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The latest PlayStation Stars digital collectible is a bobblehead of Jim Ryan, the soon to be former PlayStation boss whose last major act at the company is laying 900 people off.
Last September, Ryan announced that he is retiring from his role as PlayStation boss after 30 years at the company. And now, to commemorate his time at the company, through PlayStation's Stars program that lets you collect digitable objects (that definitely aren't NFTs), you can now get "A nod to Jim Ryan," the pun obviously intended there as it's a bobblehead of Ryan. "Help us celebrate Jim Ryan's 30 years at PlayStation by playing any one of the many impressive games he championed as CEO and get a special Digital Collectible," reads the item's description. "Happy retirement, Jim!"
I'm sure being the boss of PlayStation allows you to have quite the comfortable retirement, but I'm not sure if it's work that I'll remember him for - as last month, one of Ryan's last big acts at the company was laying off 900s of its employees, including the complete shutdown of London Studio (a studio he visited and happily smiled in photos with less than a week before this news). "Thanks for 30 years of hard work and great games, Jim" indeed.
The layoffs followed an already rough start to the year, with Microsoft having laid off an even bigger number of 1900 staff from its own video game division, and shortly after PlayStation EA announced it would be laying off 5% of its staff, as well as cancelling Respawn's unannounced Mandalorian shooter. Safe to say, the rough year the games industry had last year has continued into this one, though there haven't been quite such large scale layoffs in March, even if smaller independent studios have had to announce their closure.
But hey, at least you can forget about all that when you unlock Ryan as a digital bobblehead that you'll spin around for 10 seconds tops and forget about until PlayStation announces it's shutting down the Stars program.