Shawn Layden: 'The games industry needs to show some patience'
Tencent advisor and former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden has criticised the games industry's lack of patience during this period of widespread layoffs.
Layden's comments came during the opening podcast for GI Sprint, which is a new series of videos, podcasts and articles around the subject of making video games cheaper, faster and better. The full podcast goes live later today.
The current industry situation, which has seen tens of thousands of redundancies across the business, has been caused by slow growth and rapidly rising costs. And Layden says a side effect has been impatience from games companies when it comes to new ideas and concepts.
"That's the real frustrating thing when you see people say 'look here's a small studio that made a great game, it has true promise, it created an entirely new gaming experience, but we don't have the patience to play this thing out into part two or part three'," he began.
"Even though they didn't really get wiped out by it, they didn't have the windfall profits they expected and so they just kill this thing and go for more established AAA IP, sequels, copycats, and things that from a financial perspective you can draw a through line and say if we build this game it likely perform like this in the market. When you bring completely new things that people have not seen before, which may be fantastic and quite often are, the publishing industry doesn't have patience now to nurture these things, and they feel they need the quick big win. And that's a terrible place to be in an entertainment and creative industry."
Layden says it is ultimately the new ideas that will be what gets the industry – particularly the AAA console industry - out of its current predicament, not established brands and franchises.
"The vast majority of the planet has already said Grand Theft Auto is not that interesting, Call of Duty is not that interesting," Layden says. "They were both huge hits in our in our little village of gamers, of course.
"If people have
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