Former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Leisure, Shawn Layden, started foretelling the present, apocalyptic state of the online game trade in 2020. A chunk of typical knowledge trade onlookers will typically cite, Layden himself says it was no outstanding feat, gleaned by observing development strains over many years. He even provided some ideas for the way builders can reduce prices sooner or later and get their video games out faster.
Talking at size with GamesIndustry.biz, Layden magnanimously acknowledged being confirmed right: “Sadly, it does my coronary heart no good that I believe I used to be proper. And it wasn’t any nice prediction. It was watching development strains of over 25 years of gaming. The numbers solely go in a single route. Video games do not get any cheaper; they do not get shorter, they get extra complicated, and so they develop into extra pricey. The massive blockbusters, when individuals are swinging for the fences, they’re coming in on the $150 to $250 million bracket, and that could be a big burden on the sport growth enterprise mannequin, on the publishers for carrying that, and [that’s led] to among the contraction within the market that we have seen.”
GamesIndustry.biz is working a sequence on how builders could make video games faster and, due to this fact, reduce prices, and so they put this line of questioning to the previous PlayStation boss. Layden defined: “We reside in a world the place solely 32% of players really end the sport, so we’re making quite a lot of recreation that 68% of the folks aren’t seeing.” He thinks that the size of a recreation shouldn’t be essentially the deal breaker it was once; with the typical age of players approaching early 30s, that is an enormous pool of gamers that (typically talking) have extra money than they do time.
This was the precise reverse scenario confronted by Sony throughout Layden’s tenure: “PlayStation 1, 2, and three generations, [length] was like your high evaluate level. We saved judging video games by, you understand, how a lot gameplay you get on your greenback. And perhaps that was a good metric again within the instances when the typical gamer was of their late teenagers/early 20s, which suggests they’re time-rich and money-poor, so having to sit down down for that lengthy of a sesh to get by means of some big RPG appeared affordable.”
Subsequent, he says builders should cease chasing photorealism, questioning whether or not it improves gameplay or story commensurately: “I do not imagine you may get throughout the uncanny valley; I believe that can at all times be simply 5 steps forward. So as a substitute of chasing that, let’s return to thrilling recreation design.” He says we’re previous the purpose the place most gamers even discover the addition of issues like superior ray tracing.
Layden additionally suggests letting the machines do extra of the work, citing the Howdy Video games strategy. He says AI may have its makes use of, however the concept it may well create something new of value is ridiculous: “That isn’t going to occur. AI solely sees in a single route, which is backwards. It places stuff collectively to make you suppose you are seeing ahead, however you are actually not; you are simply seeing a rehash of backwards.” In the meantime, he sees No Man’s Sky as “a recreation with in the end infinite scope, but it surely’s basically performed by lower than ten folks as a result of they spent quite a lot of time constructing the pipeline, the toolset, which allowed them to create time and again, making the machine do a lot of the procedural heavy lifting”. He concluded: “We have to get extra of that into gaming.”
