PlayStation’s Former Chairman Says AAA Games Could Be Shorter, More Sustainable

At the GameLab Live conference last week, the former boss of PlayStation weighed in with his thoughts on the state of the AAA games business. Shawn Layden, who served as Chairman of PlayStation Worldwide Studios, said that the rising costs of game development with every generation are “just not sustainable.”

In a wide-ranging conversation that covered his 25 year career at Sony, talk turned towards The Last of Us Part 2, which spent a majority of its time in development while Layden was chairman. Layden departed PlayStation before its release this month, but he expressed great pride in it, calling it “the ultimate example” of a story-driven video game in the PlayStation 4 era.

And while The Last of Us Part 2 was seen as a milestone in emotionally driven narrative adventures, there’s been consternation regarding the game’s length and pacing, as well as the amount of money and labor that went into its development. The Last of Us Part 2 takes an estimated 25 hours to finish versus the original’s 15. And Naughty Dog spent almost twice as long developing it too. Yet the game still retails for $60.

“The problem with that model is it’s just not sustainable,” Layden said to these rising costs, explaining that the current generation has gone up to $80 to $150 million for most AAA games, without factoring marketing spend. “I don't think that, in the next generation, you can take those numbers and multiply them by two and think that you can grow," he said. "The industry as a whole needs to sit back and go, 'Alright, what are we building?”

From 2014 to 2019, Shawn Layden was President at PlayStation Worldwide Studios where he oversaw development of God of War, Days Gone and Horizon Zero Dawn.

Layden maintained that it’s the historically fixed price of games that threatens the sustainability of AAA, calling it “one of the weird freaks of nature” in the business. “It's been $59.99 since I started […] but the cost of games have gone up ten times," he said. "If you don't have elasticity on the price-point, but you have huge volatility on the cost line, the model becomes more difficult,” and said the next generation will face this challenge.

While publishers and developers are always looking for new ways to generate revenue through games – most notably via microtransactions, subscriptions and ‘battle passes’ – Layden made his own suggestion: a return to the shorter, 12 to 15 hour, AAA game. “I would finish more games, first of all, and just like a well edited piece of literature or a movie, looking at the discipline around that could give us tighter, more compelling content."

Layden argued that it’s difficult for every game to shoot for epic play times in the 50 to 60 hour range, “and in the end you may close some interesting creators and their stories out of the market if that's the kind of threshold they have to meet... We have to reevaluate that.”

Layden started at Sony in its corporate communications department in 1987, before becoming a part of Sony Computer Entertainment in 1999. In 2014, he was appointed President of PlayStation, where he oversaw the development of many AAA exclusives such as Bloodborne, Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Days Gone, Death Stranding and many more

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