His comment also suggests that the gaming industry is at an inflection point.

Xbox exclusives are starting to appear on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, and Sony is hinting at a more aggressive PC release strategy. Game sales, meanwhile, have not plummeted, nor have development costs: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 cost more than $300 million to make, a huge sum even in inflationary terms, since the first installment was made for $100 million five years earlier. That’s Sony’s problem: big sales, but little profit. And the company wants to change that.

Shawn Ladyen, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment in the US, told The Verge that development costs are an Achilles’ heel, and that he sees the return of AA games, smaller, more unique titles, as a good solution: “When the cost of a game is over $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles heel. It narrows your addressable market. Especially if you’re in the live service or free-to-play world. Another platform is just another way to open up the funnel and get more people in. In a free-to-play world, as we know, 95% of those people will never spend a dime. The business is all about conversion. You have to improve your odds by opening up the funnel. Helldivers 2 showed that for PlayStation, and it came out on PC at the same time. Again, you widen the funnel. You get more people in. For single-player games, it’s not the same need. But if you’re spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell it to as many people as possible, even if it’s just 10% more. The global installed base for consoles – if you go back to the PS1 and everything else that is stacked up there, no matter where you look at it in time, the cumulative number of consoles out there never gets past 250 million. It just doesn’t.

I’m afraid we’ve bought into the triple-A, 80 hours of gameplay, 50 gigabyte game, and if we can’t do that, we can’t do anything. I’m hoping for a return to double-A games. I’m all for that. I look back at the PS2 era and there was so much variety. You had God of War and Assassin’s Creed. But you also had Loco Roco and SingStar and Dance Dance Revolution. You had this whole spectrum of entertainment. At $7-12 million a pop, why not make a bet and see what happens? Katamari Damacy, for God’s sake, you couldn’t make that today because you can’t even explain what it is. But now, when every bet is in the hundreds of millions, risk tolerance is super low. You end up with copycats and sequels and not much else,” Layden said.

It’s no coincidence that the PlayStation 2 still holds the record for best-selling console…

Source: WCCFTech