Eurogamer’s week-long coverage of PlayStation’s 30th anniversary continues today with the concluding half of our special Shawn Layden interview, this time discussing the future of PlayStation and video game consoles as we know them today.
Where will PlayStation be in another 30 years? The end of consoles has long been prophesised, but at a time of spiralling AAA game budgets, £700 premium upgrades and an audience leaving for TikTok, the thought of us sitting here in 2054 celebrating PS9 seems increasingly unlikely.
So where does the console games industry go from here? How do you counter those enormous budgets? How can games change? And have we got to the point where, to a large extent, the hardware we play on doesn’t matter? Read on for more insight from Shawn Layden, former chairman of PlayStation Worldwide Studios, and a definitive response on whether he thinks PlayStation will ever launch games on Xbox.
How do you feel about the video game industry currently? You’ve mentioned not seeing innovative new games like PaRappa the Rapper anymore. Where are the new genres?
Layden: I guess you get new genre activity at the indies level, where there’s more risk tolerance. You have got to take the risk, otherwise you’re not gonna get anywhere. But I’m afraid that the current cost of game development, with AAA console titles costing in the hundreds of millions, squeezes risk tolerance out of the room.
‘Show me how the trend line is going to be exactly like Grand Theft Auto’
If you’re looking at something that’s going to clock in at $160m to produce, the immediate reaction of the finance guys is, ‘okay, what is that comparable to? How are you going to make me feel better? Can you show me how the trend line is going to be exactly like Grand Theft Auto, so then I can feel fine putting money behind it?’ It results in a lot of copycats, a lot of sequels. ‘Give me GTA 7, because I know how to plot that course.’
It’s squeezing, I think, creativity out at the high end and that’s a problem. On PS1 and PS2, one unit of hardware could sell 25 games. With PS3 and PS4, largely due to the network effect of people getting online, it’s much lower. Once you’re in your online world with your online friends, you don’t leave. I have a son and I don’t think FIFA ever leaves his machine. I think it’s permanently embedded inside his PS5. And if you go down the Fortnite rabbit hole or the Warzone rabbit hole, you don’t play a lot of other games. So I’m concerned about that lack of breadth.
There’s been discussion recently around how console generations aren’t growing over time, either. Is it enough to keep selling to the same sized audience?
Layden: So yes, if you stack it up and look at all the things that were around during the PS1 era, whether it’s Saturn and N64, or the PS2 and Xbox era, no generation seems to get over 250m units of hardware, aggregate. The one time it popped is when Wii Fit came out and a bunch of people thought they could lose weight by buying a Nintendo [Wii]. There’s that momentary Christmas, ‘oh, let’s lose weight’ thing which shot up the console number, but then it fell back down again.
We’re not growing the next generation. We’re losing the next generation to TikTok
Even when you hear that gaming revenue went up 23 percent during the pandemic, it wasn’t from new people, necessarily. It was more money from the people, and this is the existential threat I talk about when I’m meeting with developers and publishers – that you’re just getting more money off the same people. It’s a business model I understand, and you understand, and that’s fine. But we’re not growing the next generation. We’re losing the next generation to TikTok. The competition for gaming isn’t Xbox and Nintendo. It’s everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.
The pandemic gave us an unnatural pop for gaming, where we thought, ‘oh my god, gaming is the biggest thing in the world’. Yeah, when you’re locked down, it is the biggest thing in the world. But in a regular world scenario, you’ve got to combat against all the other distractions that are available to young people. And I’m afraid that we’re not facing that threat head on as an industry.
So then, how do we face that threat head on as an industry?
Layden: We need to address two or three things specifically. One thing is the exploding cost of game development. Every generation it costs twice as much to build a game. What costs $1m on PS1, then costs two, then four, then 16. It goes exponentially. The PS4 generation, which was the last I was associated with, game dev was 150m if you want to be top of the line, and that’s before marketing. So by that math, PS5 games should eventually reach $300m to $400m – and that is just outright not sustainable.
I’m afraid we’ve built AAA gaming into a kind of cathedral business, and it just can’t grow any further
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? I’m afraid we’ve built AAA gaming into a kind of cathedral business, and it just can’t grow any further. In fact, it’s probably grown too far already.
How do we cap that? How do we bring that back? I think part of that answer is – and it sounds simplistic, but hear me out – I think games are too long. I haven’t even opened Red Dead Redemption 2, because I don’t have 90 hours. And I’m retired and I don’t have 90 hours. For the longest time, we kept banging on about ‘100 hours of gameplay’. ‘This is going to be awesome. It’s 100 hours of gameplay!’ Like that’s the most important thing to know. That was a metric in the early years, when the average gamer was 18 to 23. And when you’re 18 to 23, you’re time rich and money poor. But as the average age of the gamer moved into the late 20s, the early 30s – well, it’s the opposite, right? Maybe you aren’t money rich, but you’re definitely time poor. So I think our approach is a mismatch to that market, to reality.