Former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, Shawn Layden, has touched base on Sony’s reported decision to shift focus away from bringing its major console titles to PC, saying the move doesn’t make much sense.
Layden was the one who made the initial decision to port first-party Sony games to the PC, which over the years has seen major title such as God of War, God of War Ragnoark, Days Gone, Ghost of Tsushima, SackBoy: A Big Adventure, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 among others come the platform.
Now, speaking with the PSI podcast, the executive questioned the format holder’s decision to make a U-turn on this strategy, believing releasing late ports to the PC didn’t impact sales.
First of all, the games don’t go on PC for like a year or whatever it is. It’s not day and date. And if they think that a game coming out 18 months after its launch on another platform somehow stopped a sale from happening 18 months ago in the hardware business, I would like to see how they can prove that thesis.
You can feel that is true [but] I don’t happen to feel that’s true. If someone’s waiting 18 months for something to come on PC, we didn’t lose a sale to them. They weren’t going to buy the hardware anyway.
There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about my decision to put games on PC. I think exclusivity is very important to a platform business. That’s how you differentiate. If you want Zelda, you go to Nintendo. If you need Mario, that’s where you go, that’s where you find it. And at the PlayStation business, we did exclusivity throughout PS1, PS2, PS3, that was just the standard of the day. We had Japanese companies who would be exclusive to the PlayStation platform, through our relationships with them. And so that became the standard way you sold the platform.
Moving into PC or multi-platform releases is really about two things. The PC thing, in my mind anyway at the time, was not to make money, frankly, it was how do I get my intellectual property in front of people who wouldn’t normally see it? How do I get the world of Horizon to be seen by people who aren’t in the PlayStation world? Not necessarily because they’re going to buy a PlayStation, I wasn’t that crazy. I didn’t think that was going to happen.
Layden had recently responded to widespread reports about the state of Microsoft and its alleged plans to shutter a number of studio, as well as the recent announcement of brining back select Xbox console exclusives such as Gears of War: E-Day, suggesting the “moves evince a basic misunderstanding of how the interactive entertainment world moves.” He also defended platform exclusives back in January, stating he believes there is “huge value” for companies like Nintendo and Sony to support them.
[Source – PSI Podcast via VGC]