Former PlayStation president Shawn Layden has suggested games need to cut back on length and steer away from realism, as he discusses the issues facing AAA development. As the cost to make video games balloons to unsustainable levels, the big question is how developers and publishers can continue to make titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Spider-Man 2 and still make their money back. We’re already seeing how, in the current climate, one flop can sink an entire studio if it doesn’t make enough money back from sales – leaving the entire industry in a precarious position, as it strives to push the limits of technology.
As such, Shawn Layden, who was president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America from 2014 to 2019, has offered his thoughts on what publishers and developers should do to make creating games more sustainable in the future. As part of a new interview, Layden highlights four key points, ranging from utilising AI to help build tools and speed up processes, to emphasising gameplay over graphics. ‘We’ve made a lot about the visual quality of games, the graphic quality, the resolution, the near photorealism that so many games seem to chase,’ Layden told Gamesindustry.
biz . ‘And our fans thought that was a was a was a noble journey, and we saw the difference between graphics on PlayStation 1, where Lara Croft is 800 polygons, and, if you squint, kind of looks like a person. And now we get to the highly realised modelling.
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