There are more games coming out every day than ever before, but the total number of people playing them doesn’t seem to have grown by nearly the same amount. Former SIE Worldwide Studios Chairman Shawn Layden says the mismatch can’t be solved by just churning out endless sequels with big budgets and more powerful hardware.
“If we’re just depending on the blockbusters to get us through, I think that’s a death sentence,” he said this week during an interview with Gordon Van Dyke, co-founder of indie publisher Raw Fury, on Gamescom Asia. , according to Gamesindustry.biz. The ex-PlayStation executive blamed the nine-figure development costs for major publishers’ less willingness to take risks. The result is that games are greenlit based on how well their monetization can be modeled, rather than whether they feel fun and innovative.
‘You are [looking] with sequels you’re looking at copycats because the finance guys who draw the line say, ‘Well, if Fortnite I’ve made so much money in this time, my Fortnite knockoff can make this in that time,” Layden said. “We’re seeing a collapse in creativity in games today [with] studio consolidation and the high production costs.”
A ‘hard reset’ of the console arms race
During the event, Layden was also asked by VGC if the incremental improvements recently demonstrated in the controversial $700 PS5 Pro show the limits of new hardware. Despite the sticker shock, the new console’s improvements were difficult for fans to immediately discern. Even a hands-on demo of The edge said the differences were barely noticeable from 10 feet away.
“It’s stabilized,” Layden said VGC. “We are in the phase of hardware development that I call ‘only dogs can hear the difference.’ If you’re playing a game and sunlight shines through your window onto your TV, you won’t see ray tracing. It has to be super optimal… you have to have an 8K monitor in a dark room to see these things.”
The executive said the chase for console power has reached a “ceiling” and called on companies to compete on content rather than specs. “It’s time for a real hard reset of the business model, a hard reset of what it is to be a video game,” he told VGC.
This isn’t the first time the former Sony veteran has done this has raised the alarm about the long-term health of the gaming industry. Layden, who suddenly left the PlayStation console maker in 2019 followed by a major shake-up in top leadership, has long warned about the unsustainable trajectory of big-budget games with each new hardware cycle, and the stagnation of a medium that brings in more money every year without increasing the overall size of its audience.
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“It’s a $250 billion global business, but the actual number of players isn’t growing at the same rate,” Layden said in his Gamescom Asia interview with Gordon Van Dyke. “So we get more money from the same people. You have to get more people to play games. How do you do that? We need to get more people making games.” He suggested that companies want to strengthen emerging developers in growing markets such as Indonesia and India.
But even as many lament the death of AA gaming, a middle ground between low-budget indies and $200 million blockbusters, it’s clear that some studios can still find success in that increasingly precarious sweet spot. That was the case last year Remnant IIA Dark souls-infused loot shooter. This year yes Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2a shooter associated with a major franchise that still manages to deliver a fantastic looking game on a budget that was less than half that of Eternal damnation. Maybe that will be the case next year Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33a French impressionist riff on the Final fantasy turn-based RPG formula that looks great due to the surprising price of $50.
Or maybe low-budget Steam hits are the new AA. Palworld, LandlordsAnd Balatro sold millions even without a huge publishing machine behind it. “AA is gone,” Layden said. “I think this is a threat to the ecosystem, if you will. So I look at indie stuff. With the advent of technologies such as the latest Unreal Engine or what Unity can offer you, I think we can all say that the standard quality of video games is now quite high compared to ten years ago.
