He says platform owners (including Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) need to do more for games between the size of Among Us and Grand Theft Auto.

Shawn Layden, who worked at Sony for three decades, held several positions at Sony but left to become head of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s U.S. division. Layden, who currently consults for Tencent, told VGC at Gamescom Asia that developers should be encouraged to make smaller games and that platform holders could help alleviate the current budget and team size issues facing the AAA games industry. He also addressed the issue of game pricing.

“Game budgets are not going to stay in the hundreds of millions. Let’s say 20 million dollars. With the current level of game development skill… it’s higher than it was 10 years ago. We have a talent pool that we can tap into with the right budget and lean on for diversity. Don’t make a bunch of double-A first-person shooters set in World War II, that’s not going to move the needle, but give us more interesting opportunities. Give me more things like Firewatch, those kinds of games.

We’re trying to get more people to play games, clearly people aren’t playing games and they’re not playing games because they’re not interested in what we’re giving them, what we’re giving them is sequels to things they weren’t interested in. I don’t think that’s going to get them in the door. If it costs $5 million to make a game, you can charge $59.99, if it costs $125 million to make a game, you charge $59.99. So the math doesn’t work. You end up with your costs and your revenue streams at a break-even point. It’s not a healthy model. But the gaming community said they didn’t want to pay more than $60 for a game.

That led the industry to this place of, “Well, how do we get them to keep spending? What is the DLC? What are the microtransactions? How do we get battle passes? How do we sell subscriptions? For some, they made good decisions on that. For others, as we’ve seen, they haven’t, and we’ve seen a backlash against companies that are charging crazy amounts of money for DLC and season passes that don’t provide any value. So I think we are up against a wall right now. If you want to make a $150 million triple-A game, you have to make a sequel.

Your ability to take risks or make a game that no one’s ever heard of at that cost, it becomes very difficult to do the math. Especially when you have companies that are more and more run by Chief Financial Officers instead of Chief Creative Officers becoming CEOs. We’ve been doing this for 30 years, every generation these costs have gone up and we’ve adjusted to it. We’ve now reached the precipice where the center can’t hold, we can’t continue to do things the way we’ve been doing them. It’s time for a real hard reset of the business model, a hard reset of what it means to be a video game. It’s not 80 hours, it’s not 90 hours, but when it is, it’s a whole different category,” Layden said.

Source: VGC