Former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Shawn Layden, began predicting the current, apocalyptic state of the video game industry in 2020. In a piece of conventional wisdom that industry watchers will often cite, Layden himself says it wasn’t a remarkable achievement gathered by observational trend lines over decades. He even made some suggestions for how developers can cut costs and release their games faster in the future.
In a wide-ranging conversation with GamesIndustry.biz, Layden magnanimously acknowledged that he was right: “Unfortunately, it doesn’t do my heart any good to think I was right. And it wasn’t a great prediction. It looked at trend lines from over 25 years of research .” The numbers only go in one direction. Games aren’t getting cheaper; they don’t get more complex, and they get more expensive, as people swing for the fences. We end up with a figure of $150 to $250 million, and that’s a huge burden on the game development business model, on the publishers who carry that, and [that’s led] to some of the market contraction we’ve seen.”
GamesIndustry.biz has a series on how developers can make games faster and therefore save costs, and they put these questions to the former PlayStation boss. Layden explained, “We live in a world where only 32% of gamers actually finish the game, so we make a lot of games that 68% of people don’t see.” He doesn’t think game length is necessarily the dealbreaker it used to be; Considering the average age of gamers is approaching the early 30s, that’s a huge group of players who (generally) have more money than time.
This was the exact opposite situation Sony faced during Layden’s tenure: “PlayStation 1, 2 and 3 generations, [length] was as your key assessment point. We kept rating games based on, you know, how much gameplay you get for your dollar. And maybe that was a decent benchmark back in the day when the average gamer was in their late teens/early twenties, which means they’re time-rich and money-poor, so sitting around for that long to get through a massive RPG seemed reasonable.”
He then goes on to say that developers should stop chasing photorealism, questioning whether it commensurately improves gameplay or story: “I don’t believe you can cross the uncanny valley; I think that will always only be five steps forward. So instead of chasing that, 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 work, citing the Hello Games approach. He says AI will have its uses, but the idea that it can create something new of value is ridiculous: “That’s not going to happen. AI only looks in one direction, and that’s backwards. It puts things together to let you thinking that you’re looking forward, but that’s really not the case; you’re only seeing a repetition of backwards.” Meanwhile, he sees No Man’s Sky as “a game with ultimately infinite scope, but it’s essentially done by less than ten people because they spent a lot of time building the pipeline, the toolset, that allowed them to create over and over again, allowing the machine to do most of the procedural heavy lifting”. He concluded, “We need to get more of that in gaming.”