The former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios has said that game development costs are “not sustainable,” and therefore to combat this, developers should make their games shorter.
Speaking with Eurogamer as part of the PlayStation 30th anniversary, Shawn Layden, who left Sony back in 2019 and now works at Tencent, noted that the games industry is fixated on “getting more money off the same people” and that development costs must therefore come down until this changes.
Every generation it costs twice as much to build a game. What costs $1 million on PS1, then costs $2 million, then $4 million, then $16 million. It goes exponentially.
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[During] the PS4 generation, which was the last I was associated with, game dev was $150 million if you want to be top of the line, and that’s before marketing. So by that math, PS5 games should eventually reach $300 million to $400 million, and that is just outright not sustainable. It’s like we’re at the end of the 18th century, and we’re realising that building cathedrals is really expensive. Can we continue to build these massive edifices to God for this incredible amount of labour and time? Or should we just build four walls and a roof, and that’s a church, right?
Speaking in the same interview, Layden was asked if there was a particular game or franchise he would like to see PlayStation return to at some point, and he picked MediEvil. Back in October, Layden suggested that relying on blockbuster video games in the future is a ‘death sentence‘ for the industry.
[Source – Eurogamer]