Former PlayStation Boss: 'Exclusivity Will Always be Important' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 May 2024 / 3,895 Views
The former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden in an interview on the What's Up PlayStation podcast stated exclusive games will always be important for consoles gaming.
"Exclusivity will always be important, it helps focus and highlight the features of your platform," said Layden (via VideoGamesChronicle). "What can you do here technically that you can’t do someplace else.
“But, as your platform becomes established as the market recognizes where you sit in that pantheon of gaming options, I think the necessity of exclusivity becomes a little bit less."
He added, "PlayStation was never a first-party-driven platform. You look at Nintendo & Sega in the 90s, their first-party output was the lion’s share of the software market. You could publish on N64 but the top 10 games were always going to be Nintendo games on there.
"PlayStation always began with a third-party focus of the platform business. First-party isn't there to steal market share from Electronic Arts or Square, first party is there to grow the pie bigger."
Layden in another recent interview with GamesBeat stated that ballooning budgets on first-party AAA games is an "Achilles' heel."
"When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel," said Layden at the time. "It reduces your addressable market. Particularly when you’re in the world of live service gaming or free-to-play. Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in.
"In a free-to-play world, as we know, 95% percent of those people will never spend a nickel. The business is all about conversion. You have to improve your odds by cracking the funnel open. Helldivers 2 has shown that for PlayStation, coming out on PC at the same time. Again, you get that funnel wider. You get more people in.
"For single-player games it’s not the same exigency. But if you’re spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell it to as many people as possible, even if it’s just 10% more. The global installed base for consoles–if you go back to the PS1 and everything else stacked up there, wherever in time you look at it, the cumulative consoles out there never gets over 250 million. It just doesn’t."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Exclusivity would be an Achilles heel if the budget was over 200m, in the previous article.
How did games become so darn expensive to make nowadays!?
Photo realism. Open World. You need to cut one of the two, if you want to reduce budgets imo. Shawn Layden mentions nintendo, their cartoon artstyle, and him personally likeing alot of games with anime art styles, and seeing that as a solution as well. Basically people got caught up in chaseing photo realism, instead of worrying about makeing good games. He doesn't think photo realism is that important to a good game.
If your doing a photorealistic game, I dont think mocap is that more expensive than animateing everything yourself. Its probably faster/cheaper.... the "high profile actors" is def. a big one though. Same with voice actors. Which is probably why, MS doesn't put more effort into sub/dubs for their games (which in turn, then means they do less well some area's of the world, than sony titles where they spend more to get better sub/dubs). So theres trade offs, on some things. Just be Nintendo, speech bubbles and squicky sounds, and no actors (voice or mocap) = big profits.
Your comment speaks the truth of why games cost so much these days.
Pointless high graphics
Reggie at E3 2004. "He with the best games wins, always been that way, always will" and in 2024 that's still true.
I would just cut the budget in half for AAA games, limitation is the key to creativity.
Not for the xbox.
Exclusivity is not a monolithic thing. It works for the guy in first place, it might not be a good business strategy for the person in third.
we are talking about how much money you make from selling your games though, you are focusing on hardware sales only, not software sales
the entire point is that modern games cost a lot more to make than Sega Genesis games, you can't afford to invest 5 years and 100 million dollars in to a game that gets trapped on a platform with a small installed base
This generation though, there is one big issue with that. The Series S is so bottlenecked that you have to fundamentally compromise the design of your game to make it work on there. 8GB's of ram is what tablets from 5 years ago have, that elderly people use. Multiplat on Xbox is bad idea now
Whats bottlenecked about the Series S?
only 8GB of fast ram like the PS4, the extra 2GB are slow, and the total amount really isn't any more than the PS4 Pro, so it can't reach the next gen
the Series S should have been 50 percent faster (half the Xbox Series X in total) and the full ram, or at least 12GB
that's not true, the iPhone only got 8GB for the first time a few months ago
most of the iPads today still don't have 8GB, they have 4GB or 6GB
It is true. I have two tablets from 2018 and both have 8gb's of RAM. The MS surface go 2018 edition with 8GB's. Lenovo Tab 10 2018 8gb'. My phone also from 2017 and was a budget phone from Xiaomi and that has 6gb's
there were tablets with 8GB years ago, so what, the point is most of them did not
you are talking about windows equivalent tablets, I'm talking about iPads
the iphone 15 pro was the first iphone to have 8GB, a few months ago
non-pro iPads still don't have 8GB, none of them do except one, the M1 iPad Air
Exclusives should only be 1st party games, 3rd party games should be on everything (Unless they have been co developed)
Sony is slowly getting more third party exclusives by default of Xbox not selling well enough. That's not Sony's fault that's MS's
Right. Its more than just that. People don't realize that only a third party publisher can make their game exclusive. In a case like Final Fantasy, what Square can figure out how much a game could sale on Xbox and whether they can actually make more money by spending less on things like development to another platform and advertising fees. If Square thought that they could make more money by making it multiplat they would. They already know that they make more money by making it exclusive to PlayStation, collecting a fee from them and they having Sony pay for advertising. They present this offer to Sony and go from there. Why would Sony say no?
Great point. Sony is blamed for "moneyhatting" tactics for getting third party exclusives, but those tactics wouldn't work if games sold much better on Xbox. The money made from Sony's exclusivity offer is better than the money made from Xbox sales because the games sell poorly on xbox
Because it's Final Fantasy, so it's going to sell significantly better on a PS console regardless?
What about Phil working so hard just to get FF14 on Xbox then? Did he say "oh it's just Final Fantasy no-one will buy it on Xbox anyway"
The question wasn't why MS should ensure that FF is on Xbox. It was why Sony should pay for exclusivity.
Even then, how well did it sell on Xbox compared to PlayStation?
FF15 released on Xbox at the same time as PS. A google search bought up our very website:
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/267083/final-fantasy-xv-sells-an-estimated-265m-units-first-week-at-retail/
90% PS4 vs just 10% XBO
Not sure what the advertising was like at the time though, Sony might have had advertising rights.
FF14 wasn't paid exclusivity, originally it was on PC and PS4 only because of cross play, SE didn't want a split player base, MS said no. So SquEnix said okay, you don't get the game then. Since MS changed their policies, Yoshi-P has done a lot to not only get it on Xbox but working with Xbox to change a lot of their regulations to get it to happen.
Thank you for making my point for me. Why would Sony pay for Final Fantasy exclusivity when it practically already has the monopoly on any new mainline FF game?
You literally believe companies are purposely choosing to keep their games off other platforms? You think they are deliberately choosing to make their games exclusives?
Absolutely. Why would they want to compromise the design of their game by developing for a severely bottlenecked console like the Series S when the games don't even sell well because everyone just uses gamepass anyway.
Yet they will release it on low end PC hardware down the line later.. yeah no. This isnt the PS3 vs 360 era where console designs were extremely different. Series X/S and PS5 are practically the same machine. More customers is always a good thing.
Series S has just 8GB's of RAM. Tablets that released 5 years ago for elderly people have 8gb's of RAM. Designing a game around the limitations of that console would destroy the quality of the title.
Series S plays all next gen games
Technically runs them but some games are really struggling. Lords of the fallen is practically unplayable on it. Just wait until more unreal engine 5 games start coming out
Thats not far fetched.... The port costs money, and if you approach sony, and say "we'll keep our game off of xbox if you pay us X" it might work, and you now get guarented money upfront, sony pushing your game (save on advertisements), you save on porting the game, and you get the "this is a exclusive" attention debate from both sides, likely leading to more sales too. They likely have people that analyse if its better to go one way or the other, and it depends on how much sony is willing to pay.
So than you agree in moneyhatting.
100%. The legend of heroes series has never released on Xbox and it has nothing to do with Playstation.
Or unless the publisher is bought? Transparent.
If a company wants to totally invest into a brand and take full responsibly of a studio, go for it.
If MS didn't buy Bethesda, Starfield and Redfall would've been much better games because Sony would not have allowed them to release in the state that they are in. Starfield recent reviews on steam are abysmal. They could release them because MS would've just said "yeah who cares just chuck it onto gamepass"
If MS didn't care, they wouldn't have delayed both games. Sony wouldn't have done shit. Much worse games have launched on playstation, some even exclusive.
What exclusive games with big promotion and marketing have come to PS in the last 10 years that's worse than redfall? and don't say Forspoken, it's just an average game it's not broken like redfall
Let's see, off the top of my head, that Predator game, Destruction Allstars, Foamstars, Knack, The Order 1886, Babylon Falls, and probably more if I really cared enough to research. Not only that, Sony has let some pretty terrible 3rd party games release on psn over years, which Redfall would fall under.
I don't really care if Sony has a bad exclusive here and there because it happens with everyone. What I find annoying is your constant sony dickriding like they can do no wrong.
Knack sold at least a million copies (according to vgchartz) and it even got a sequel, something Redfall has no hope for. If it was as bad as your saying that wouldn't be possible. Saying it's as bad as Redfall is so disingenuous and unfair. People keep saying I'm a dick rider but all I do is try and speak the truth. Knack wasn't even intended to be a blockbuster title like Redfall, just a small launch game
There are people on here that believe Sony will follow MS, and will bring their blockbuster single player games to PC within 1 year of launching on PS5. Not a chance, and this only proves it.
They already do for lots of them already. Why do people care if they eventually release on PC? Console gamer's will always be console gamer's regardless.
Not within a year don't. Only live service games day and date on PC. If they release them them on PC too soon after launching on PS people won't buy the games on PS and even worse they won't buy the console. Look at how bad it is for Xbox right now
Yeah, because people are going to fork out Nvidia prices.
No they don't. What exclusive other than Hell divers 2 which Sony already said GAAS is day 1 has released on PC within a year?
Saying there is no chance is naive. Several years ago, you probably thought Sony would never release games on PC, but look where we are. Sony's CEO has already made it clear they want more multiplatform releases, and with the success of Helldivers 2 on PC, it's looking more and more likely.
Please stop putting GAAS and single player in the same category. Yes Sony want GAAS games on PC day one, I know that. Put single player games on PC too soon and PS will start selling like Xbox. Can't you see that?
You, and other Sony fanatics might not like it the idea, but last I checked, the big boss at Sony thinks otherwise. He made his statement clear and wasn't talking about only live service.
Got nothing to do with being a Sony fanatic I just don't want to see what happened to Xbox sales happening to PS sales too. MS can survive with those low sales but Sony depends on it's gaming division to do well unlike MS
