By Shawn Layden served as Sony PlayStation’s chief from 2014-2019, succeeding Jack Tretton and overseeing the company throughout the PS4 era.
He exited just before the PS5 launch, handing over the keys to Jim Ryan who himself exited earlier this year after a more tumultuous reign over the brand.
Layden is now working at Tencent Games as a strategic advisor and recently was asked by VGC at Gamescom Asia if the incremental improvements showing the limits of new hardware meant the console wars were possibly over.
The upcoming PS5 Pro on paper has around three times the power of the current PS5, and yet the differences haven’t been noticeable to most people. Layden says:
“It has plateaued. We’re at the stage of hardware development that I call ‘only dogs can hear the difference.’
If you’re playing your game and sunlight is coming through your window onto your TV, you’re not seeing any ray tracing. It has to be super optimal…you have to have an 8K monitor in a dark room to see these things.
We’re fighting over teraflops and that’s no place to be. We need to compete on content. Jacking up the specs of the box, I think we’ve reached the ceiling. That race is nearly over, and you know who won? AMD.”
AMD of course supplies the chips for both PlayStation and Xbox. Layden continues, saying it’s time for a “real hard reset on the business model” as “we cannot continue to do things that we have done before”.
He also says it’s time for a hard reset on what it is to be a video game, taking a brief shot at those who equate gameplay hours with quality: “It’s not 80 hours, it’s not 90 hours, but if it is that’s a whole different category.”
In further comments via GameIndustry.Biz, he says a lot of the problem is the decisions are being made by the finance guys more than the creatives:
“[In the past] we spent a lot more time looking at games and not asking ‘what’s your monetisation scheme’, or ‘what’s your recurrent revenue plan’, or ‘what’s your subscription formula’? We asked the simple question: is it fun? Are we having a good time? If you said yes to those questions, you’d usually get a green light.
Today, the entry costs for making a AAA game is in triple digit millions now. I think naturally, risk tolerance drops. And you’re [looking] at sequels, you’re looking at copycats, because the finance guys who draw the line.”
He goes on to compare it to the same issue with the film industry where the middle ground movie is gone and “everything is blockbuster/Marvel Cinematic Universe, or it’s Sundance award contender”. Those movies, however, found a place to go with the different streaming services. Gaming isn’t so lucky:
“In the gaming business you have Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, indie stuff. But then that middle piece, that middle layer that used to be where Interplay, Gremlin, Ocean, THQ, all those companies, made their money… That middle piece is gone.
If you [can become] AAA, you survive, or if you do something interesting in the indie space, you could. But AA is gone. I think that’s a threat to the ecosystem if you will… if we’re just going to rely on the blockbusters to get us through, I think that’s a death sentence.”
The comments come as Sony will introduce its PlayStation 5 Pro next month for a whopping $700 in the U.S. and even higher in other territories.
The post Layden: Console Wars Are “Nearly Over” appeared first on Dark Horizons.
