Former Sony exec says focusing on high-budget blockbusters is 'a death sentence' for the games industry
Speaking at Gamescom Asia, former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden offered a grim diagnosis for the state of the games industry: AA studios have disappeared, and rising development costs have left the industry in a creative death spiral (via GamesIndustry.biz).
In the games industry's younger years, Layden said, «we spent a lot more time looking at games and not asking 'what's your monetisation scheme', or 'what's your recurrent revenue plan', or 'what's your subscription formula'? We asked the simple question: is it fun? Are we having a good time? If you said yes to those questions, you'd usually get a green light.»
Since then, however, the costs of AAA game development have grown exponentially, creating a risk-averse industry environment where publishers are unwilling to back anything that isn't deemed a guaranteed blockbuster success. «Back then you didn't make a game for millions [of] dollars, so your risk tolerance was fairly high,» Layden said. «Today, the entry costs for making a AAA game is in triple digit millions now. I think naturally, risk tolerance drops.»
The result of that plummeting risk tolerance is what Layden called «a collapse of creativity» in game development. «You're looking at sequels, you're looking at copycats,» Layden said, «because the finance guys who draw the line say, 'Well, if Fortnite made this much money in this amount of time, my Fortnite knockoff can make this in that amount of time.'»
According to Layden, that relentless push towards AAA development trends has wiped out a middle ground that once existed between the biggest-budget studios and indie developers. «That middle layer that used to be where Interplay, Gremlin, Ocean, THQ, all those companies, made their money… That middle piece is gone. If you [can become] AAA, you survive, or if you do something interesting in the indie space, you could,» Layden said. «But AA is gone. I think that's a threat to the ecosystem.»
I think Layden's on the mark about the upward-spiraling
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