It was in 2020 when Shawn Layden started sounding the alarm about the rising costs of game development.
Speaking as part of Gamelab Live, Layden said that the current rising costs of AAA game development have become unsustainable, and that when the industry transitions to the PS5 and Xbox Series to grow.
Now, four years later, we caught up with Layden as part of our new GI Sprint series of videos, podcasts, and articles, which is all about lowering the costs of game development.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t do my heart any good to think I was right,” Layden says. “And it wasn’t a great prediction. It was looking at trend lines from over 25 years of gaming. The numbers only go in one direction. Games aren’t getting cheaper, they’re not getting shorter, they’re getting more complex, they’re getting more expensive.
“The big blockbusters, when people are jumping for the fences, come in at $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.”
Over the next three weeks, we’ll explore countless ways that game developers can make games faster, and therefore at a lower cost. And as part of our opening podcast, Layden shares his thoughts on what studios might want to consider. You can watch the podcast below, download it here or find it on the podcast platform of your choice.
Make your games shorter
One thing developers need to ask themselves is whether bigger is really better?
“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,” Layden explains. “So should we continue building games that are unlikely to see the end of most people?
“It costs to build to the end. You can tighten that up. If you can make your games on a shorter timeline, the costs are reduced. You get to market faster, you can satisfy your customers sooner rather than I think we just need to re-examine how we present ourselves and our games to the gaming audience.”
“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”
Layden believes that height isn’t necessarily the dealbreaker it used to be.
“It was such a big deal in the early days of gaming. In the PlayStation 1, 2 and 3 generations [length] was as your key assessment point. We continued to rate games based on: you know how much gameplay you get for your dollar. And maybe that was a decent benchmark back when the average gamer was in their late teens/early twenties, which means they’re time-rich and cash-poor, so they have to sit around for that long to get through a massive RPG. seemed reasonable. I just think that as the average age of gamers approaches their early 30s, you’ve got the turning point: they’re richer in money and poorer in time. You really need to make some free time if you’re going to get started with Red Dead Redemption 2 and get through it.
“We need to understand what our customers are looking for. Do they want a game that is high impact and a lot of fun, that might not include large parts of the game where you look for this blue rock to bring it to the red troll and he will open a door for you. It’s ‘grinding’ for a reason.
Stop chasing photorealism
There is so much investment in areas like ray tracing, but are we spending too much time, effort and money on visual improvements that the majority of our players don’t notice?
“We’ve written a lot about the visual quality of games, the graphics quality, the resolution and the almost photorealism that so many games seem to strive for,” says Layden. “And our fans thought this was a noble journey, and we saw the difference between the graphics on PlayStation 1, where Lara Croft has 800 polygons and, if you squint, looks a bit like a person. And now we come to the highly realized modeling. But did it improve the gameplay?
“I don’t believe you can cross the uncanny valley, I think you’re always only five steps ahead. So instead of chasing that, we’ll go back to exciting game design. I love good anime. I love highly realized animated films. characters are exciting because they can tell a different kind of story.”
“We are in the realm of graphic differences that only dogs can hear”
Layden says we’re approaching a point where the improvements we see on screen won’t even be noticed by most players.
“The console war started as a rocket race. Each side tried to push the boundaries of technology. People talked about teraflops all the time without really understanding what it meant. You had all these different types of statistics that people were throwing around,” he says.
“But we’re now at the point where you have advanced ray tracing and most platforms can do 60 frames per second, some can do 120, which your eye can’t register anyway. I think we’re on the brink of that universe, we are now in the realm of differences that only dogs can hear. And maybe that’s not what the focus should be anymore So let’s get back to… what can I do that’s so funny, entertaining and interactive would be that someone would want to spend their money and time and enjoy themselves in a way that means they get their money’s worth, and that we can at least continue to pay a living wage or better to the people who make them .
But will gamers really be okay with shorter games that don’t challenge the graphics?
“Well, you don’t say the quiet part out loud [Laughter]. Again, let’s stop seeing the game as just a collection of time-based activities with some visual acuity. Let’s create an activity that would be fun, and these are the rules, these are the characters… and we don’t start deconstructing a game based on whether the frame rate is 60 every time. That’s not how you deconstruct films.”
Let the machines do more work
When it comes to AI, Layden believes that programmers should start building tools that allow for some automation in the development process.
“The way we make games has remained virtually unchanged over the past 40 years,” he says. “When the game gets more complex, or when there’s heavier work to be done, or when we need more art supplies… usually we just throw people at it. Or we hire some people in Malaysia or Eastern Europe and throw them out there. Labor has always been the default response to the increased workload and size of games. People in the interactive entertainment industry, especially in coding and programming, are some of the brightest minds in computer science. And we need to let the machine do more of the work.
“We need to get more out of the technology, build the toolsets and build the engines that can help. I look at what happened to the guys at Hello Games with No Man’s Sky. A game that ultimately has infinite scope, but it was essentially done by less than 10 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 could do procedural heavy lifting. We need to get more of that in gaming. “
“We need to make the machine do more work.”
Some AI tools will help with that, but Layden doesn’t believe AI will build games for us.
“AI will be an enabling technology,” he says. “Of course you have a big business advisory group claiming that by 2030, 50% of games will all be written by AI… that’s not going to happen. AI only looks in one direction, and that’s backwards. It brings things together to help you make you think you’re looking forward, but that’s really not the case, you’re just seeing a repeat of backwards. AI is a bit like the really enthusiastic intern that you can say, ‘Hey, give me nine pages about something’ and they are like ‘certain boss’ and they pull it out. But you have to check the facts. AI is hallucinating and going off the rails.
“It’s a great tool for bringing a bunch of knowledge into a space and condensing it into four paragraphs. It’s really good at that. I think we’ll see more first draft work done. Some of the video AI kits out there mean you can recreate a scene quite quickly to get an idea of whether something looks interesting. So at that idea stage it can help speed things up. But I don’t see it happening any time soon for writing games .
Be disciplined and kill your loved ones.
Finally, Layden says that we need to be strict with deadlines, and that we can all learn a thing or two from the way sports games are made.
“One thing we see in studios is that they latch on to a thought, an idea or a wish, and you have to constantly question what you think you’re doing,” he says. “Accelerate the proof of concept, accelerate the proof of tech, so you can make the hard decision and say ‘that doesn’t work’. The people who keep trying to make the thing work over an extended period of time… they think like If we just do a little more, we can get there, but the rest of your game is sometimes just waiting for that mechanic to set up and it will slow you down. You have to have a disciplined idea of what you want to make and how you’re going to get it .Don’t be too sloppy with your alpha or beta target.
“You need to have a disciplined idea of what you want to create and how you are going to achieve it. Keep your deadlines tight. Don’t be sloppy with your alpha or beta goal”
“Look at teams that are doing well. Any team that builds a sports game every year… that’s a miracle to see. They do a new game every year in nine months. In my old store, where they have MLB: The Show in San Diego do…Major League Baseball doesn’t change opening day. It’s April 1st every year. You can say, ‘Well, they know what they’re doing, it’s the same stadiums, it’s the same players they’re used to moving them around. .’ Yeah, because they’ve established what their variables are from year to year, they have a list of things they can add. They take care of all the maintenance, like moving the players, updating stadiums, getting new facial scans …and then here There are some new things to add But there is a date where you say: ‘That’s it, function locked, we’re done’.
‘You want to be able to have it [time for] people to get inspired and come up with new ideas and really have a flashpoint moment where they solved the problems of the universe. But you need to have a strong hand in production management. It’s, ‘That feature is great, but we missed the window to put it in. If we do that, all these other things will be broken. So hang in there, we’ll get back to you.”
If we can make games again in three years, the thought of dropping an idea or feature will eventually become more bearable.
“If you can turn around games in two to three years instead of five to six years… it’s easier to put an idea aside because you say, ‘I’ll come back to it in two years.’ In the current model, if you don’t bring this idea in now, there may never be a chance to get it in.”