Former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Shawn Layden, began predicting the current, apocalyptic state of the video game industry in 2020. Layden himself says it was no remarkable feat. trend lines over decades. He even offered some suggestions on how developers can lower costs and get their games to market faster in the future.
In a lengthy interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Layden generously acknowledged that he was proven right: “Unfortunately, it doesn’t do me any good to think I was right. And it wasn’t a great prediction. He’s been tracking trend lines for over 25 years. they don’t get cheaper, they don’t get shorter, they get more complex and they get more expensive. it comes in the range of $150 million to $250 million, and that’s a huge burden on the game development business model, on the publishers who carry it, and [that’s led] to some of the decline in the market that we’ve seen.”
GamesIndustry.biz has been running a series on how developers can speed up games to cut costs, and asked a former PlayStation boss this question. Layden explained, “We live in a world where only 32% of players actually finish a game, so we create a lot of games that 68% of people don’t see.” He thinks the length of the game isn’t necessarily what it used to be; with an average player age approaching the early 30s, it’s a huge group of players who (generally speaking) have more money than time.
This was the exact opposite of what Sony faced during Layden’s tenure: “PlayStation 1, 2, and 3 generations, [length] was like your best review. We’ve always judged games by, you know, how much gameplay you get for your dollar. And maybe that was a decent metric back in the days when the average gamer was in their early 20s, meaning they’re time-rich and cash-poor, so sitting around that long to get through some huge RPG seemed reasonable.”
He goes on to say that developers need to stop chasing photorealism, questioning whether it proportionally improves gameplay or story: “I don’t believe you can get past the uncanny valley; I think it’s always going to be five steps ahead. So instead of chased after it, let’s get back to exciting game design.” He says we’re past the point where most players will even notice the addition of things like advanced ray tracing.
Layden also suggests letting the machines do more of the work, referring to Hello Games’ approach. He says AI will have its uses, but the idea that it can create anything new of value is ludicrous: “That’s not going to happen. AI only sees one way, which is backwards. It puts things together to make you think that you’re” looking forward, but you’re not really seeing, you’re just looking back.” Meanwhile, he sees No Man’s Sky as “a game with infinite scope, but it’s basically made by less than ten people because they’ve spent a lot of time building the pipeline, the toolkit, which allowed them to create over and over again, so the machine does most of the procedural heavy lifting”.