Shawn Layden, the former President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, has said during a stage talk at Gamescom Asia that there has been a “collapse of creativity” in the video games industry, and that relying on blockbuster titles alone is “a death sentence.”
Speaking alongside Gordon Van Dyke, the Co-Founder and Chief Publishing Officer at Raw Fury, the former Sony executive talked about the decline of the AA development studio in the industry, and the rising cost of producing triple-A titles.
Today, the entry costs for making a AAA game is in triple digit millions now. I think naturally, risk tolerance drops. And you’re [looking] at sequels, you’re looking at copycats, 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.’ We’re seeing a collapse of creativity in games today [with] studio consolidation and the high cost of production.
Now if we can just get a bit more interest and excitement and exposure for these lower budget, but super creative and super unusual [type] of games… I’d like to see more of that. Because if we’re just going to rely on the blockbusters to get us through, I think that’s a death sentence.
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Layden added that “AA is gone” which he views as “a threat to the ecosystem” and also touched on AI, stating his belief that it’s “not a saviour.”
Artificial intelligence has been in gaming since almost the first or second games ever made. So all this excitement about gen AI, I find kind of humorous. I do see its applications in certain places for certain things. But it’s just a tool, it’s not a saviour. It’s a tool in the way that Excel is a tool. It just helps speed you along your tasks.
Layden would later assume the role of chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios in Mach 2018, a position he held until September the following year. Although it was speculated at the time that Layden departed Sony due to an internal power struggle with Jim Ryan, he would later confirm he decided to leave due to exhaustion, and in September 2022 joined Tencent as a strategic advisor.
[Source – GI.biz]