Shawn Layden
People have been trying to figure out ways out of the hard times of the gaming industry after a temporary growth during the pandemic. Shawn Layden, former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment, has pointed out some issues that we face and could be inspirational on how we can move out of the trend. In his eyes, the major issue is “the exploding cost of game development,” which is “not sustainable.”
In an interview with Eurogamer, Layden pointed out the existential threat the developers have been experiencing. The fact is that the same people who play games, not newcomers, have contributed to the 23% gaming revenue increase during the pandemic. So that makes the threat “that you’re just getting more money off the same people.”
These people, the gamers, were “time rich and money poor” when they were 18 to 23, “but as the average age of the gamer moved into the late 20s, the early 30s – well, it’s the opposite, right? Maybe you aren’t money rich, but you’re definitely time poor. “
Yet, the industry isn’t adjusting to adapt to this change and still boasts long hours of content, which, in his opinion, becomes “a mismatch to that market, to reality.” The long playing hours mean there will be enough content to present to players, which means the cost of developing a game would be extremely high, and Layden called it “exploding cost.”
“Every generation it costs twice as much to build a game. What costs $1m on PS1, then costs two, then four, then 16. It goes exponentially. The PS4 generation, which was the last I was associated with, game dev was 150m if you want to be top of the line, and that’s before marketing. So by that math, PS5 games should eventually reach $300m to $400m – and that is just outright not sustainable.”
He then uses the example of spending tons of money on building cathedrals in the late 18th century as a metaphor for our situation with the gaming industry right now, “Can we continue to build these massive edifices to God for this incredible amount of labour and time? Or should we just build four walls and a roof, and that’s a church, right? I’m afraid we’ve built AAA gaming into a kind of cathedral business, and it just can’t grow any further. In fact, it’s probably grown too far already.”
What can help alleviate the dilemma between longer and longer games with increasing cost and gamers who struggle to find time on the games when distracted by non-gaming entertainments like TikTok? In his opinion, the answer is quite simple: shorter games might be a solution as “games are too long.”
“I would like to see a world where you can get back to 18 to 23 hours of gameplay, but with gameplay so compelling you don’t want to put the controller down. I want the entire game to be like that moment in Resident Evil where the freaking dogs come through the window and you drop your controller out of fear. I want more of those kinds of game moments, if we can bring down the scale and scope.”
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