Former PlayStation Boss Shawn Layden: Cost of AAA Games is 'Not Sustainable' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 04 December 2024 / 1,700 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.