Shawn Layden, the former Chairman of Sony Interactive Worldwide Studios, has revealed during an interview with the Save State Plus podcast that he left the PlayStation manufacturer partly due to its pivot to live service games.
Layden had been with Sony for more than 30 years when he left Sony just ahead of the launch of PS5, and revealed that he wasn’t particularly taken with the company’s strategic changes during this time.
To be honest, you know, the company was making some strategic decisions about where they want to take the platform in the future with a heavy emphasis in games as a service, live-service gaming, subscription formulas, recurring revenue, whatnot, and that was kind of not my wheelhouse.
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I just make things like God of War and Spider-Man and Last of Us and Uncharted [and] Horizon. I didn’t have the vision or the energy to try to, you know, take it to this this new area of live-service gaming so, all that considered, it seemed like a good time to step down after 32 years at Sony.
Layden said back in February during a chat with KiwiTalkz that he doesn’t think that the PS6 will be a completely discless system, and in December suggested that it probably wouldn’t be worth it to bring PlayStation games to Xbox formats.
[Source – Save State Plus via Kotaku]