Former Sony Exec Worries Creativity Will Stagnate Due To AAA Sequels & Free Games
from the how-far-we've-come dept
I’ve talked about Shawn Layden before. And in admiring terms, too. In the wake of the much of the industry consolidation we saw in the video game space last year, his comments about both what that would mean for creativity within gaming, the creation of entirely new titles, and even moreso what he said about the need for preservation within the industry, I nodded my head along with him.
Well, Layden is back in public again, once again worrying aloud about creativity in the industry. Except this time I think some of that worrying is overwrought.
“It’s a $250 billion global business but the actual number of players doesn’t grow at the same pace,” Layden said in his Gamescom Asia interview with Gordon Van Dyke. “So we’re getting more money from the same people. You need to get more people playing games. How do you do that? We need to get more people making games.” He suggested companies look to empower up-and-coming developers in growing markets like Indonesia and India.
As the Kotaku post goes on to note, there are actually plenty of outlets for this kind of creativity. Granted, there are more examples of them in the PC gaming space than on consoles, but that is starting to change as well. Indie titles, or so-called AA titles (as opposed to AAA), are appearing on gaming consoles more and more these days.
Last year it was Remnant II, a Dark Souls-infused loot shooter. This year it’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, a shooter attached to a big franchise that nevertheless manages to deliver a great-looking game on a budget that was less than half that of Doom Eternal. Maybe next year it will be Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a French Impressionist riff on the Final Fantasy turn-based RPG formula that looks great for its surprising $50 price point.
So, okay, some of this might be coming from a former console boss who’s no longer in the business. And while his desire for creative output and more diverse titles is laudable, any cries of lament for an industry that is still churning out a ton of new content seems a bit dramatic for my tastes.
But when he talked about the creativity needed in the industry, and what he saw as standing in its way, one quote stood out to me.
“If we’re just going to rely on the blockbusters to get us through, I think that’s a death sentence,” he said during an interview with Gordon Van Dyke, co-founder of the indie publisher Raw Fury, at Gamescom Asia this week, according to Gamesindustry.biz. The ex-PlayStation executive blamed nine-figure development costs for less willingness among big publishers to take risks. The result is games getting greenlit based on how well their revenue can be modeled instead of whether they feel fun and innovative.
“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,’” Layden said.
Huh. How far we have come. You may recall that there was a time, not too long ago, where all kinds of folks in the so-called copyright industries were talking about how “you cannot make money with free.” A product given away for free, they argued, could not make the kind of money that a tightly protected, non-free product would make. And these comments were focused on the digital media industries.
Well, apparently now the thought pendulum has swung all the way in the opposite direction. Here you have a former console executive saying that some free games, like Fortnite, are so profitable that the finance guys want so many more of them that it’s impeding on creative output.
Now, I don’t know that to be actually true. I’m fairly steeped in the gaming industry generally and I don’t see anything remotely like a dearth of creativity. But it is interesting to see just how much the views of some executives on the topic of free games has changed.
Filed Under: aaa games, blockbusters, fortnite, free to play, indie games, shawn layden, video games
Comments on “Former Sony Exec Worries Creativity Will Stagnate Due To AAA Sequels & Free Games”
Reading this today is funny. Factorio got a massive update for free and a full expansion today. I think vampire survivors just did as well.
I haven’t bought a full price AAA game for awhile as indie games and games from smaller studios have been much higher quality for a better price.
Bring me the Rich And Famous contract!
Odd how independently produced games, distributed through steam, or word of mouth, funded out of the developer’s free time, or word-of-mouth go-fund-me/Kickstarter projects get overlooked. A very, very small percentage of them go viral and become a Big Thing.
Our Hero, Shawn Layden, isn’t looking at the Video Game Slush Pile, he wants a best seller NOW.
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It sounds like you literally ignored what he said.
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It sounds like you didn’t read the article, so don’t realize AC is simply boiling down what was written.
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To be fair, it’s not so much that’s what he wants, he’s just observing that counting on blockbuster triple-A games to continue carrying the industry is basically going to lead to failure. But unfortunately, that’s exactly what other execs and investors and publishers want, because the alternative is taking risks – and ain’t nobody got time or money for that.
Odds are, not even teams in India and Indonesia will save the industry from its own obsession with triple A. By and large, they look at smaller markets as sources of cheap coding labor and not much else. The good news, if you can call it that, is that studios like Ubisoft are finally starting to crumble their own weight.
AAA sequels with nine-digit budgets that become make-or-break projects for studios is not sustainable for the industry. Creativity in the AAA realm has stagnated quite a lot. What else is unsustainable is the release of free games that use scummy monetization, especially those that are doing it solely because they saw an F2P game like Fortnite get huge and think they can get a piece of that pie. Layden’s concerns are well-founded especially as the industry has seen record layoffs in the last couple of years.
“Not too long ago” was 17 years ago, according to that link. Are you sure you’re actually as steeped in the industry as you think you are? Because your prior pieces across the years really makes it seem like you aren’t. The one article on Angry Birds embracing scummy monetization, and you lauding it because “Hey they’re making it free!”. The piece on Animal Crossing during the pandemic where people were doing real-world item and service trading (which most gamers know is rife with abuse and fraud like WoW gold farmers or Diablo 2 item sellers) and acting like Nintendo cracking down on that was the worst thing in the world. And more recently your piece on the Baldur’s Gate 3 limited editions that insinuates that scalpers are some manner of legitimate market force rather than a market distortion.
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I wouldn’t attribute that solely to stagnation. There’s been somewhat of a frenzy in studio buy-ups and mergers, which always leads to a lot of layoffs. Microsoft alone fired about 2,500 people from their various gaming divisions after they bought ActiBlizz.
The publishing director for Larian Studios also talked about the layoffs being an ‘avoidable fuckup’, citing mismanagement and greed as the main reasons.
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TIL: Stagnation in an industry doesn’t lead to financial losses, and therefore doesn’t lead to mergers and buyouts.
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Or, you know, large companies like to make money, so they buy smaller companies that have had success in the past, and when they can’t sustain it(because nobody can), jobs are cut. That sounds like greed and mismanagement to me.
But sure, let’s just blame stagnation exclusively.
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Or, you know, large companies like to make money, so they buy smaller companies that have had success in the past, and when they can’t sustain it, jobs are cut. That sounds like greed and mismanagement (including not acknowledging the role of stagnation) to me.
But sure, let’s just ignore the contribution of stagnation entirely.
AAA sequels with nine-digit budgets that become make-or-break projects for studios is not sustainable for the industry. Creativity in the AAA realm has stagnated quite a lot. What else is unsustainable is the release of free games that use scummy monetization, especially those that are doing it solely because they saw an F2P game like Fortnite get huge and think they can get a piece of that pie. Layden’s concerns are well-founded especially as the industry has seen record layoffs in the last couple of years.
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Look at Bethesda as an example. As James Stephanie Sterling pointed out in their most recent video, Bethesda’s major titles have been, from a gameplay perspective, the same exact game since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion—to the point where many of the bugs present in Oblivion are present in Starfield, a game released 17 years after Oblivion.
Not every game needs to be (or can be) a Grand Theft Auto, off- or Online. At some point, the industry will have to reckon with the idea that AAA gaming can’t be the backbone of the industry. That day is coming sooner rather than later, and woe be unto every major studio that thinks it needs another Starfield instead of a game like Hades. The industry needs shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not fucking kidding. I’d gladly take a dozen games on the level of Vampire Survivors or Buckshot Roulette if it means a game that sells “only” two million copies in three years is seen as a failure by its publisher.
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Man, I picked the wrong day to stop huffing magic markers. 🙃
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I’ll say. It’s supposed to be “I’d glad-Lee take…”
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I’ll raise you “praised publicly as a success but laid off anyway”
https://www.gamesradar.com/xbox-says-hi-fi-rush-was-a-success-in-all-key-measurements-amid-rumors-of-poor-sales/
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/12/07/xbox-game-awards-2023/
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I hate that “big company buys small studio, company lets studio make a game that does well, company closes studio because a bigger game from the company bombed” is going to be a normalized thing from now on. Fuck studio buyouts and mega-mergers.
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On the plus side of this story:
https://www.ign.com/articles/hi-fi-rush-ip-and-tango-gameworks-acquired-by-krafton-from-xbox-studio-will-no-longer-be-shut-down
The game industry is obsessed with graphics does every games have to have 3,d graphics with 4k ray tracing which are expensive to make on consoles There’s too much mergers Microsoft buys up devs then acks all the staff in a year .there’s a wider range of games on PC as small company’s can release games without asking Microsoft or Sony for permission and try out all sorts of weird games .
There’s only one Fortnite it makes a profit as it keeps on making new characters and people pay for skins and add-ons
It’s a metagame it can release new add-ons every month and sell them as it has millions of players
It’s unlikely there’s room for someone to make a new Fortnite that can attract millions of players
And there’s new games released on mobile every day
Many console games are now reboots or remakes
As in film it’s safer to remake old hits franchises than spend millions on a new game
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That state of affairs is both depressing and hilarious (“I call it deprarious”). We’re at a point now where graphical fidelity can’t really be improved much more and graphical “realism” is heavily taxing PCs and consoles alike. Pushing graphics even further in that regard is a fool’s errand.
The industry doesn’t need graphical realism—it needs a better grip on graphical aesthetics. Nintendo gets this better than basically any other major company: Echoes of Wisdom isn’t a graphical accomplishment on the level of the Silent Hill 2 remake, but its aesthetic is perfectly suited for a Legend of Zelda game. Games with good gameplay and “bad” graphics that have a much better feel for aesthetics and style will always be better than games with mediocre-to-bad gameplay and graphics that can overheat a video card.
I’ll again bring up Buckshot Roulette because that game accomplishes what it sets out to do with graphics that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the late PS1/early PS2 era. Everything about it feels filthy and wretched. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
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This. While it is true that Nintendo commits draconian legal thuggery more often than not, their products have a consistent quality that other AAA studios do not; that is, they’re playable on Day 1, they don’t include microtransactions, and there are no big noticeable bugs (usually) when they’re released. Also, there are secrets in their games that may take decades to discover.
I just wish they weren’t gigantic assholes to their customers and fans. 😞
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Mate, have you tried playing Pokemon Scarlet?
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FYI, Leah qualified her statement. Please read the following quote:
I don’t think it’s a matter of free or whatever so much as a matter of what Layden said: the bean-counters want a formula to produce predictable successes.
A friend of mine noted the same thing about movies and television, and I agree with him. When the people who ran the studios wanted to make movies, we got great movies. But then control changed hands and the bean-counters, the financial people, stepped into the executive roles. They don’t really get creativity, the sort of person who does doesn’t generally go into finance or accounting, but they understand formulas and math. So when they look for what kinds of movies to produce, they look at what’s already succeeded and seek a formula that, if repeated, will produce a repeat of that same success. Which is why whenever a film does blockbuster business at the box office we shortly thereafter see a swarm of copycats, rip-offs and sequels. It’s not anything about the original film, it’s the bean-counters going “Aha, a formula. If we do the same things that film did, we’ll get the same box-office results.”.
I think the game industry’s going the same route. The executives aren’t interested in free games so much as they are in repeating whatever it was Fortnite did that made it successful, and free was one of the things it did. And yes, those executives are indeed missing the point: Fortnite succeeded because it differed from other games in some important way, and the only way to follow it’s “formula” is to not follow it’s formula too closely.
OR: stop automatically green-lighting any and all mergers under the sun
and the “problem” will solve itself.
However, seeing as that’d require a non-captured regulatory body worth — at the very least — its name in shit, that’s not happening this side of the apocalypse.
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I would say Lina Khan is non-captured. It’s just that the judiciary is captured.