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Former PlayStation boss 'deathly concerned' about ballooning budgets of AAA games, questions how many live-service 'forever games' like GTA Online and Fortnite fans really have time for
Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden expresses concern over rising AAA game budgets, decreasing risk tolerance, and the saturation of the live-service market, highlighting the challenges of competing for players' limited time and the difficulty of creating successful 'forever games'.
Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden is "deathly concerned" about the fact that budgets for big AAA games are ballooning, as he points out that as the cost of making games increases, the allowance for devs to take risks can quickly drop.
In an interview with YouTube creator Destin Legarie (below), Layden, who was previously Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios' chairman, says: "I'm deathly concerned about it. I think it's an existential threat to gaming that we see these ballooning budgets for AAA games. We find that as the budget goes up, the risk tolerance goes to zero pretty fast."
While he acknowledges that people can still point out great gaming successes today, he responds: "Yeah, well, let me show you the buckets of not great successes." He adds that people shouldn't "dwell on the failures of the past, but definitely try and take a lesson from it," whether that's finding "a way to dial down the costs or just attack a whole new market again," pointing to the AA market and asking, "how does that come back to life?"
After this, he discusses a trend of "excitement around live services" that emerged following the COVID-19 pandemic, acknowledging that many devs and publishers "tried to get a piece of that pie." He continues: "What we're learning over time – and maybe time was the only teacher here – how many games of service can really be viable in the market at the same time? How many 'forever games' can one person actually play, and then how do you grow a market against that?"
While "a lot of people have tried," Layden says it "seems really hard to break into that magnificent seven," as he points to successes like GTA Online, Fortnite, and Apex Legends. As Legarie notes, there's also the issue of games competing for players' time and convincing them to play new things as opposed to their old favorites. "There's a switching cost," Layden adds, giving the example of a Destiny 2 player trying to convince their friends to try out a new looter shooter with them. "They go, 'Nah, we're not feeling it,' and then you go, 'Hey, I'm not feeling it either. OK, we'll just stay where we are.'"
It's a conundrum that most of us have probably faced in the past – having too many live-service games on the go at once can be overwhelming, and it's easy to stick to the ones you've already poured a lot of time into. This is probably a large reason why newer live-service titles sometimes struggle to stick, although there are definitely exceptions – just look at NetEase's third-person shooter Marvel Rivals.