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Shawn Layden on PS games releasing on Xbox: "I don't know what the business imperative would be to do that"

Tiago Rodrigues

Tiago Rodrigues

Member
Part 2 of the great interview with Shawn Layden is online at Eurogamer.
Make sure to check it out

Some tidebits from today's part:

How do you feel about the video game industry currently? You've mentioned not seeing innovative new games like PaRappa the Rapper anymore. Where are the new genres?

Layden: I guess you get new genre activity at the indies level, where there's more risk tolerance. You have got to take the risk, otherwise you're not gonna get anywhere. But I'm afraid that the current cost of game development, with AAA console titles costing in the hundreds of millions, squeezes risk tolerance out of the room.
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If you're looking at something that's going to clock in at $160m to produce, the immediate reaction of the finance guys is, 'okay, what is that comparable to? How are you going to make me feel better? Can you show me how the trend line is going to be exactly like Grand Theft Auto, so then I can feel fine putting money behind it?' It results in a lot of copycats, a lot of sequels. 'Give me GTA 7, because I know how to plot that course.'
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It's squeezing, I think, creativity out at the high end and that's a problem. On PS1 and PS2, one unit of hardware could sell 25 games. With PS3 and PS4, largely due to the network effect of people getting online, it's much lower. Once you're in your online world with your online friends, you don't leave. I have a son and I don't think FIFA ever leaves his machine. I think it's permanently embedded inside his PS5. And if you go down the Fortnite rabbit hole or the Warzone rabbit hole, you don't play a lot of other games. So I'm concerned about that lack of breadth.
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There's been discussion recently around how console generations aren't growing over time, either. Is it enough to keep selling to the same sized audience?

Layden: So yes, if you stack it up and look at all the things that were around during the PS1 era, whether it's Saturn and N64, or the PS2 and Xbox era, no generation seems to get over 250m units of hardware, aggregate. The one time it popped is when Wii Fit came out and a bunch of people thought they could lose weight by buying a Nintendo [Wii]. There's that momentary Christmas, 'oh, let's lose weight' thing which shot up the console number, but then it fell back down again.
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Even when you hear that gaming revenue went up 23 percent during the pandemic, it wasn't from new people, necessarily. It was more money from the same people, and this is the existential threat I talk about when I'm meeting with developers and publishers - that you're just getting more money off the same people. It's a business model I understand, and you understand, and that's fine. But we're not growing the next generation. We're losing the next generation to TikTok. The competition for gaming isn't Xbox and Nintendo. It's everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.
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The pandemic gave us an unnatural pop for gaming, where we thought, 'oh my god, gaming is the biggest thing in the world'. Yeah, when you're locked down, it is the biggest thing in the world. But in a regular world scenario, you've got to combat against all the other distractions that are available to young people. And I'm afraid that we're not facing that threat head on as an industry.
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If console hardware becomes somewhat irrelevant, does competing on content see Sony putting PlayStation games on Xbox, as Microsoft has done on PlayStation?

Layden: I don't know what the business imperative would be to do that.

Playstation has been the leader for almost every generation it's been in. You talk about Xbox 360 being a huge competitor with PS3 and, for a while... they got out the gate sooner, they grew a large market. But in the end PlayStation fought to a tie in America and the UK. With Xbox 360 we look at a global footprint and PlayStation is far and away the global leader, because it is the leading platform in 170 countries around the world. Microsoft never had that kind of global reach, so they could never build a global market to the scale that PlayStation does.
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So the question you're asking is: should PlayStation, with that huge market lead and the momentum, apparently, going forward, should they build versions of their games to run on a competing platform of much smaller size and scale? As the saying goes, I don't know if the juice is worth the squeeze. How many additional sales would they get versus the brand impact, all the aggro? You know the Sony fanbase gets really upset whenever a game comes out on PC, 18 months after the original release on PlayStation. I never understood that aggro but, you know, it's there. And if that's what they're going to say about a PC release, just imagine what the market would say about Xbox releases from PlayStation Studios.
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Interesting views on PS games releasing on Xbox, specially currently.

The entire interview is worth the read though.
 
XXL

XXL

Member
"I don't know if the juice is worth the squeeze."
If You Say So Wow GIF by Identity
 
SkylineRKR

SkylineRKR

Member
He's correct though, consoles never seem to go beyond 250m and the pandemic was a one of a kind freak accident, not a situation you should rely on.

And yeah, Sony gains nothing from going multiplatform. There are like 25m Xbox out there (I am aware everything is an Xbox now). Increased Xbox sales from Sony software could eat up Playstation sales. So the end result might be the same. On the other hand Xbox does gain from it because their console userbase is rather pathetic and doesn't grow. They can actually expand their reach to a healthy Playstation 5.

With ballooning budgets were are at a point that a risk is too costly, and in the current landscape will likely fail. Indies can do what they want, but they are indies. They don't really grow gaming as a whole. The big names like Rockstar would need to take risks and create more than just GTA, but I understand why they don't.
 
Killjoy-NL

Killjoy-NL

Gold Member
There's a reason why he started the live-service strategy.
The whole point is explained in the Fifa/Fortnite/warzone example.

They want people locked into their platform and preferably playing a live-service game of theirs.

And no sane market-leader would ever release their games on their direct competitor's platform.
It makes absolutely no sense business-wise.

This is just plain logic.
 
Polygonal_Sprite

Polygonal_Sprite

Gold Member
Putting the Wii’s entire success down to people wanting to lose weight after Xmas… Classic Sony. Surprised he didn’t add in that PS2 has now sold 175 million units.
 
T

TehGoomba7s

Member
They still sell extremely well and make a lot of money, why release them to an audience that has been conditioned to "wait for game pass"? Unless MS offered them a fuck ton in cash to offset the loss of revenue.
 
Tiago Rodrigues

Tiago Rodrigues

Member
Polygonal_Sprite said:
Putting the Wii’s entire success down to people wanting to lose weight after Xmas… Classic Sony. Surprised he didn’t add in that PS2 has now sold 175 million units.
Click to expand...
I mean...what gave Wii those sales was the casual market doing everything but play games. The motion controls novelty was so big that even MS and Sony tried to pursue it.

Switch was selling much more games when it had sold "only" 100M consoles which is what Wii sold for a reason. Gamers are actually the ones buying it.

The problem with appealing to casuals is that once the novelty is done, they move on. It's fashionable to like for 3 days and then they are gone. I'll remind people here that the Wii sold 4 million consoles in November in the USA alone (not sure what year)! No one ever came close to that momentum. Even Switch was never even close to that. Yet one sold "only" 100M while the other is at 140M.
 
TGO

TGO

Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
Even he seems to question Sony's direction, what can I say but...he's right
 
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E

ExtendEmbraceExtinguish

Member
I really hope Sony does not release any ps games on the Xbox ecosystem. They should also not bring any of those ps games to pc. Hopefully Sony gets from soft and keeps it exclusive.

Let msft do Xbox anywhere, get 1 more big boy acquisition ( all pubs they own will be on ps regardless), msft will just need to focus on integration of console/pc/handheld via a better gaming store tied into windows. Also utilization of Ms edge as a way around other stores, pass that 30% to the consumer via mtx discounts and undercut all stores.
 
U

Unknown Soldier

Member
ExtendEmbraceExtinguish said:
I really hope Sony does not release any ps games on the Xbox ecosystem. They should also not bring any of those ps games to pc. Hopefully Sony gets from soft and keeps it exclusive.

Let msft do Xbox anywhere, get 1 more big boy acquisition ( all pubs they own will be on ps regardless), msft will just need to focus on integration of console/pc/handheld via a better gaming store tied into windows. Also utilization of Ms edge as a way around other stores, pass that 30% to the consumer via mtx discounts and undercut all stores.
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The correct order for that strategy is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Embrace, extend, and extinguish - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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Polygonal_Sprite

Polygonal_Sprite

Gold Member
Tiago Rodrigues said:
I mean...what gave Wii those sales was the casual market doing everything but play games. The motion controls novelty was so big that even MS and Sony tried to pursue it.

Switch was selling much more games when it had sold "only" 100M consoles which is what Wii sold for a reason. Gamers are actually the ones buying it.

The problem with appealing to casuals is that once the novelty is done, they move on. It's fashionable to like for 3 days and then they are gone. I'll remind people here that the Wii sold 4 million consoles in November in the USA alone (not sure what year)! No one ever came close to that momentum. Even Switch was never even close to that. Yet one sold "only" 100M while the other is at 140M.
Click to expand...
Did you forget it being sold out for the best part of 3 full years and Wii Sports, Twilight Princess, NSMB, Mario Kart, Prime 3, Skyward Sword, Mario Galaxy and it's sequel? Gamecube backwards compatibility and the Virtual Console were also good features for the time.

Of course casual stuff like Wii Play / Fit had a huge effect on it's install base but it was far from the only part of it's appeal...
 
Horseganador

Horseganador

Member
Devaluing the brand to such levels by selling 4 copies on a rival console where hardly any software is sold is nonsense.
 
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