LogIn"That's a threat to the ecosystem."
Shawn Layden, former CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America who joined Tencent in 2022, believes the AA game industry is dead, and this is a big problem.
At Gamescom Asia, he expressed his opinion on the current state of the business, saying that relying on "blockbusters" is a "death sentence."
"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. So I'm looking at indie stuff… With the advent of technologies, like the latest Unreal Engine or what Unity can give you, I think we can all say that the standard quality of video games is pretty high now compared to ten years ago," he said (via GamesIndustry.biz).
Layden said that in the past, companies didn't ask about monetization schemes of pitched games right away, more interested in whether they were fun or not. "Of course back then you didn't make a game for millions [of] dollars. So your risk tolerance was fairly high."
But nowadays, making AAA titles takes ridiculous sums of money, so the risks are much worse.
"And you're [looking] at sequels, you're looking at copycats, because the finance guys who draw the line say, 'Well, if Fortnite made this much money in this amount of time, my Fortnite knockoff can make this in that amount of time.' We're seeing a collapse of creativity in games today [with] studio consolidation and the high cost of production."
In 2020, Layden talked about game scopes, wishing to return to shorter experiences, but it doesn't seem possible now.
So what should AA studios do? Layden offered a piece of advice:
"Bring something that you sort of challenge yourself to see – the gaming media, this medium, is so flexible, it can do so many different things," he said. "So I think your strengths in AA are going to be [that] your time to market should be faster. You know, to get 1,500 developers to do the next [GTA], that's not the place you need to go for your AA. If you're a developer, you've got to be able to say, 'I can get something up and running in two to three and a half years.'"
If they want to pitch their game to Layden, they should start with why it needs to be made, not with monetization and revenue.
And AI won't help much there: he thinks it's a tool, "not a savior," although it's pretty good for ideation. Previously, Layden said that AI sees "backwards," relying on already created information. He thinks it's great for summarizing and creating drafts, but he doesn't see it writing games "anytime soon."
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