AA games are dying a slow death, and relying on big-budget “blockbusters” is a recipe for ruin. At least that’s what Sean Layden, the former CEO of PlayStation, said when he visited Gamescom Asia and in an interview with Raw Fury in Sweden.
Shawn Layden often speaks out on issues directly related to the gaming industry. The businessman has repeatedly criticized the decisions of some developers and publishers, which led to large layoffs and studio closures. Leyden confirmed that the main view at the moment is from financiers who look at games only through the lens of monetization.
We used to spend a lot more time researching games and we didn’t ask, “What’s your monetization plan,” “What’s your recurring revenue plan,” or “ What is your subscription formula”? We asked a simple question: is it fun? Will we have fun doing this? If you answered “yes” to these questions, you would normally get the green light. We were less concerned about the end result. Of course, you didn’t make million dollar games back then. So the risk tolerance was very high.
Now the cost of a AAA game is in the hundreds of millions. I think naturally risk tolerance is decreasing. And then you focus on sequels and copycats because the financiers who draw the line say, “Well, if Fortnite made this much money in this amount of time, I can knock Fortnite off so much should be done in this time. Today we are seeing a decline in creativity in games due to studio consolidation and high production costs.
Various developers, including former Piranha Bytes employees, have expressed similar sentiments. The founders of Pithead Studios said they wanted to avoid the “cool valley” of AA games, which would have been a problem for Gothic developers a few years ago. Of course, no one would call the Elex series “indie” (even if we leave the issue of publisher, THQ Nordic), but even the biggest fans would not put it next to Call of Duty or the one thing. Star.
According to Leyden, this niche, intermediate link and bridge between “indie” and big-budget “blockbusters” no longer exists, which threatens the “ecosystem” of video games. Now we only get expensive AAA titles or “interesting” indie releases, and rarely anything in between. The same thing was about to happen in the film industry, although streaming platforms like Netflix came to the rescue.
However, Leiden was quick to point out that the quality of games is much higher now than it was ten years ago. Developers, even independent ones, have easy access to technologies such as Unreal Engine or Unity to create beautiful games.
So Leyden hopes the industry will show “a little more interest and excitement” in lower budget but “very creative and very different” games. Blockbusters alone are, in his opinion, a death sentence for video games.
