Shawn Layden, the former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, has argued that games this generation are simply getting too expensive to produce and should be much shorter if the industry has any hope of surviving. Layden is seemingly addressing this generation’s lengthy development periods between AAA games which has resulted in a notable lack of consistent, heavy-hitting exclusives on PS5 (and by extension, Xbox Series X/S) compared to the previous PlayStation generation.
Speaking with Eurogamer as part of the PlayStation 30th Anniversary, Shawn Layden reflected on his time at PlayStation and how budgets have spiralled out of control this generation. Layden made some valid points about game budgets doubling in most cases such as Horizon Forbidden West or The Last of Us Part II, which had reported budgets of over $200 million each. “Every generation it costs twice as much to build a game. What costs $1 million on PS1, then costs $2 million, then $4 million, then $16 million. It goes exponentially.,” said Layden.
He continued:
“[During] the PS4 generation, which was the last I was associated with, game dev was $150 million if you want to be top of the line, and that’s before marketing. So by that math, PS5 games should eventually reach $300 million to $400 million, 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?”
To drive Layden’s point home, one of the best games of 2024, the deck-building roguelike card game Balatro, was made by a single developer on a shoestring budget compared to most blockbuster releases this year. Balatro is currently nominated for five awards at The Game Awards including Game of the Year and is widely respected by players. There are several similar cases in the past like It Takes Two or Celeste which were also developed on smaller budgets and received similar accolades.
The point remains, video games are getting too expensive to develop today and it’s also taking longer to develop them, leading to some frustration among players for the longer waiting periods between big releases.
Layden also hints that games should also be shorter. For many open-world games that pad out the game’s length with remedial fetch quests or “busy work”, it gives the illusion that a player’s hard-earned money was well-spent when in reality, they’re simply playing longer games for the sake of the game being long, not the quality of the content itself which should be a priority.
Source: Eurogamer
