Former PlayStation Boss Shawn Layden: Cost of AAA Games is 'Not Sustainable' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 04 December 2024 / 2,264 Views
Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden in an interview with Eurogamer stated the cost of AAA games in recent years is not sustainable.
"We need to address two or three things specifically," said Layden. "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.
"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."
Layden stated one way to bring down the cost of AAA games is to make them shorter. Rather than have a game that around 100 hours to beat have them around 20 hours.
"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.
"I've made a bunch of games that were 80, 90 hours long so I'll be the first to say those weren't always 100 percent quality hours. There were a lot of moments in there where I really felt 'am I running across this same field again?' I would like to see a world where you can get back to 18 to 23 hours of gameplay, but with gameplay so compelling you don't want to put the controller down. I want the entire game to be like that moment in Resident Evil where the freaking dogs come through the window and you drop your controller out of fear. I want more of those kinds of game moments, if we can bring down the scale and scope."
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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I agree with him on games being shorter. I don't need a million side things to do either. I don't see what's wrong with making a tight 20-25 hour game. I imagine sometime soon AI will help decrease the cost a bunch whether people like it or not.
There is nothing at all wrong with $200M, 100 hour games. They just shouldn't make up the majority of a publisher's projects. Variety is important in business.
These executives are trying to hit a homerun each time they step up to the plate because they want that big payoff, they want the next GTA or CoD, but that's really not necessary. There is no reason why you can't make money with a single or a double.
There should be more $40 or $50 dollar games. Charge less and people won't have the same expectations. PC has cheap games that make plenty of money because they don't need to be cutting edge, they just need to be entertaining.
Lol this coming from the former president of Sony, who literally brought Sony to this point. I’m glad it took him literal decades, retirement, and seeing the long-terms consequences of short-term fixation on a graphical arms race to finally reach this realization. :)
Not to say the responsibility lies solely on Shawn, though he certainly was a leading proponent in enabling this unsustainable environment.
It wasnt only him leading Sony down this path. I don't understand why you're scrutinizing him for something every AAA studio and publisher is dealing with. AAA gaming costs are not sustainable, and its 100% true. We as gamers bitch and moan when games are not bigger and better, get upset when games take too long to make, and then blast it all over social media if the product isn’t up to a certain standard. I really hate gaming culture with how entitled it has become.
“It wasnt only him leading Sony down this path.” Never said he was, only criticizing him for what he contributed (which was an awful lot being that he was the CEO of SoA).
“why you're scrutinizing him for something every AAA studio and publisher is dealing with.” Is it wrong to say Nintendo hasn’t been dealing with this issue? (At least, not until NSW2 drops.) Of course, I’m not gonna act like Shawn should’ve known better b/c hindsight bias on my end…but at the same time, it’s awfully ironic that one of the leading proponents in enabling this unsustainable outcome is now all the sudden coming out in opposition to these practices.
“We as gamers bitch and moan when games are not bigger and better, get upset when games take too long to make, and then blast it all over social media if the product isn’t up to a certain standard.” You’re describing two different types of people (both of which tend to be very vocal). Not to say there isn’t overlap…but i’d like to rep the community not with blanket labels. I’m one who would love seeing less investments in making the most graphically impressive title ever(!) in exchange for stronger gameplay/story/quicker dev time/etc. Not every game needs to be this massive AAA experience. Indies serve as the perfect example of this.
I think the problem is that everyone realizes the problem, but no one has a good solution to it.
We have companies like ther. They’re the NISes,, the Falcoms, the Gusts, the Marvelouses of the gaming world. The ones whose games sell in the hundred-thousands. They also get little fanfare.
Agreed on AAA games business becoming unsustainable, specifically for those doing ultra realistic graphics, and agree on 100 hours being pretty daunting.
I still haven't even beat BotW because I'm 100 hours in and know it'll probably take another 100 hours for me to finish it, and at 100 hours it's already by far the longest one player game I've ever played. I love the game, but playing one game for that long is daunting to most adults who do stuff other than play games. I want to try out the Xenoblade Chronicles games but I always hear they are 100 hour games and I'm just thinking I'm unlikely to even start that kind of game for years when I have shorter games I can play and still need to get through 200 hr games like BotW and TotK.
I'm not a fan of super short games either though, I'm talking about when a AAA game gets released and people hype it up and then you find out it has all of 5-10 hours of gameplay haha.
Long RPGs back in the day were 40-60 hours. I think that is a good length for most big long games. The occasional 100+ hour Skyrim/Zelda/Elden Ring/whatever is fine, but for most big epic AAA games I think hitting around 50 hours for a playthrough is perfect, as long as it has lots of replay value so those players who want to keep exploring all the game's sidequests or secrets or alternate paths or whatever can do that.
Luckily I'm a Nintendo gamer and they usually go for a non-ultra-realistic art aesthetic so they mostly aren't plagued by the unsustainable ultra long development times, but it's not totally absent from them either.
How are they getting more expensive? Its not like games are getting any better since ps2 days. Graphics and ai /physics improve, but the game engines get alot better and supposed to make game development easier.
I do miss the old days though. Remember when rockstar games gave us gta3/vicecity/san andreas, bully, warriors , manhunt 1 and 2, midnight club, red dead, all in one generation. Now we get 2 games every 10 years from them/.
That’s the opposite problem. GTA V is the second single best selling game of all time, behind Minecraft. Not only does it still show up on top ten sales lists almost twelve years later, GTA Online generates a perpetual stream of revenue. Why would Rockstar roll the dice on smaller games when they have a perpetual cash cow? Strauss Zelnick even came out and said as much recently: “we don’t make small games.”
And the investors of every other company in Rockstar’s tier are pushing them to make the next GTA V.
Yeah good for them and worse for the consumer. They could still make other games for those who want single player experiences, while they still milk gta 5 for those who want online.
“The consumer” votes with their wallet, and those votes overwhelmingly go to GTA in a landslide. dwarfong the likes of Bully, Max Payne, Manhunt, and even Red Dead.
Just five games make a significant amount of revenue in the gaming world:
GTA, Minecraft, CoD, Fortnite, and Roblox.
Yeah. Imo, console gaming peaked during the PS2 gen. I still occasionally enjoy a new game here and there, but it's games like Astrobot, or that neat indie title that's doing something new and fresh. For AAA, it's mostly retro (PS2 and older) for me. They were more fun back then.
Definitely not ustainable, something needs to give. Either graphics need to be toned down, games made smaller, AI techniques used more and more to alleviate costs, something. Games with $200m+ budgets just aren't sustainable in this market, core gaming has stopped growing in total user count, pretty much sitting flat.
I'd like to know what is it exactly that costs so much, salaries haven't doubled every generation (as far as I know). Is it the length of dev time that overall leads to games being much more expensive?
When people demand a level of detail that lets them see every individualized wrinkle and freckle in their player character's ball sack or labia, that tends to run up development costs.
I'm pretty sure many devs also love being able to do that.
And none of it is all hand drawn. Graphics engines, dev tools, as they keep advancing make it easier for artists and programmers. Motion cap has been a thing for ages, and it;s not like they need to go scanning every texture themselves.
Quite a few studios are in places that have high costs of living (ex. California) so higher salaries are needed for top tier talent, gaming tech has gotten at least ten times more complex with new innovations and game system layers that have been added to game development over the years (ex. motion capture and graphics race) and also how big development teams have gotten (which extends into salaries) Bungie barely had a little over 100 employees total when they released the behemoth that was Halo 3. Compare that to over 4,000 employees that worked on something like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. That's a LOT of people that need to be paid for their work.
From the 80s, 90s, and into the 2000s, it was very common to have 100 people or just a dozen to work on a game. Going into the 2010s, the number of developers needed skyrocketed.
A lot of studios are based in places like Texas and North Carolina, which have lower COL than California. Really cheap places like Oklahoma don't have the educational base or the skillset to support AAA development, and little to attract people who do have the educational and skill backgrounds needed (which is why their COL is so low to begin with).
Tech cost, salary increases, inflation, needing hundreds or thousands of developers, much longer development cycles, games needing continuous updates to be profitable and relevant.
Salaries haven't double... but team size has
~ Last of Us 2 - 2,200 people
~ Assassin's Creed: Origins/Odyssey - 4.400 people
~ Red Dead Redemption 2 - 4,100 people
~ Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) - 3,100 people
~ God of War 2018 - 1,700 people
~ Kingdom Hearts 3 - 1,800 people
Go back to the PS3 generation and the vast majority of AAA games were touched by less than 500 people...
~ Uncharted 2 - Less than 100 people
~ Assassins Creed II - Less than 500 people
Don't forget development times! It also takes longer to create each game, which means a longer time to pay the significantly higher costs.
I 100 % agree with him, about everything, I think.
No shit.
A lot of games these days that cost so much are trying to be overly ambitious with the amount of content the Devs are trying to put in, where I feel they sometimes lose sight of the real picture of what the game is suppose to be.
If Ghost of Tsushima can be that amazing with a $60M cost then I can't see why others games have to be substantially more.
Simplify the game features/story if required, and cap a budget for AAA games etc...this is 100% doable.
Aim for likr 60hours of quality instead of a bloated 100 hours+ thingy.
Also scope.... kill off open world, to some degree.... thats often what skyrockets the dev costs.
'We need a larger variety of games at different pricing levels.' Problem solved.
Problem is that sounds like, 'we need to do more, complicated work, for less money,' and nobody is going to go for that until they're forced to.
Luckily, it seems like we're starting to reach that breaking point.
When everyone has fooled themselves into believing that a AAA game has to a 100+ hour sandbox where all assets are custom made, trying to push cutting-edge photo realism, with 10 hours of orchestral score and 50 hours of voice acting, then true, it's not sustainable.
Keep your games exclusive!! No matter the costs!! Stop PC Ports!!! Xbox betrayed their fans! Stop taking away the value of Playstation. I would be ready to pay up to 100$/£/€ per game (standard edition) to do it.
tbf a vast majority of PC gamers are not moving over to console, just as a vast majority of console gamers are not moving over to PC. Might as well cut your losses with a PC port.
Hasn't he said this before? Lots of interviews with him recently. He says 20 hours like that's a short game. Uncharted 2 could be completed in 8 hours. :P
Are consumers willing to accept same prices for less production? Doubtful. Are they willing to accept higher prices for AAA games? also doubtful. To be fair, how many truely "triple A" games do we get now? Spiderman 2 might have cost a lot but for all intents, it's also made back it's money. As of April articles said it's sold 11 million copies and it's meant to be a show stopper for promoting the console, it apparently needed 7.2million to "break even", well it did that and more.
Yet I agree with the sentiment, I think there has been some lost art of late of the idea of making a game then using those resources to make a sequel, we've gone from entire trilogies in a few years (1 gen) to if we are lucky, a trilogy over a decade. Horizon 1 came out in 2017, 7 years ago, 2 came out in 2 years ago, so it's another 3 before the next? Uncharted 1, 2 and 3 were wrapped up in 4 years.
Anyway, solutions? More quality midpriced games? But that costs money. :P
The problem is there are too many AAA gamed being made at once, and that's stretching funds way too thin.
If the platform sells enough (150 million+) then the games are affordable to make. If you have a failed console, then obviously you'll never make back money from a modern AAA titles on it.
If you want to make AA titles, then you can't charge $70 for them. People will just play Steam games.
I still think there’s room for AAA games but Studios need to mix in some AA games here and there to balance things out. And mix up the releases-Sequel, new IP, Sequel, New Ip, etc. Stop running your franchises into the ground while barely touching older IP that fans have been wanting for years.
AI says hallo..
Kids these days seem fine to just play Fortnite and Roblox type games, and don't need consoles. The main console base is getting older and has less time to play games. The anti Woke brigade is committed to trying to get everyone online boycotting AAA games that hurt their fragile little egos. The pirates like to think they can just download the games for free, and someone else can pay for it.
Those aren't games they're festering pieces of garbage.
You have a point with Roblox, though Fortnite is at least the very least a fun game with a very talented team working behind it.
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