Where will PlayStation be in another 30 years?
So where does the console games industry go from here?
How do you counter those enormous budgets?
How can games change?
How do you feel about the video game industry currently?
You’ve mentioned not seeing innovative new games like PaRappa the Rapper anymore.
Where are the new genres?
You have got to take the risk, otherwise you’re not gonna get anywhere.
How are you going to make me feel better?
It results in a lot of copycats, a lot of sequels.
‘Give me GTA 7, because I know how to plot that course.’
It’s squeezing, I think, creativity out at the high end and that’s a problem.
On PS1 and PS2, one unit of hardware could sell 25 games.
Once you’re in your online world with your online friends, you don’t leave.
I have a son and I don’t think FIFA ever leaves his machine.
I think it’s permanently embedded inside his PS5.
So I’m concerned about that lack of breadth.
There’s been discussion recently around how console generations aren’t growing over time, either.
Is it enough to keep selling to the same sized audience?
It’s a business model I understand, and you understand, and that’s fine.
But we’re not growing the next generation.
We’re losing the next generation to TikTok.
The competition for gaming isn’t Xbox and Nintendo.
It’s everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.
Yeah, when you’re locked down, it is the biggest thing in the world.
And I’m afraid that we’re not facing that threat head on as an industry.
So then, how do we face that threat head on as an industry?
Layden:We need to address two or three things specifically.
One thing is the exploding cost of game development.
Every generation it costs twice as much to build a game.
What costs $1m on PS1, then costs two, then four, then 16.
Can we continue to build these massive edifices to God for this incredible amount of labour and time?
Or should we just build four walls and a roof, and that’s a church, right?
In fact, it’s probably grown too far already.
How do we cap that?
How do we bring that back?
I haven’t even openedRed Dead Redemption 2, because I don’t have 90 hours.
And I’m retired and I don’t have 90 hours.
For the longest time, we kept banging on about ‘100 hours of gameplay’.
‘This is going to be awesome.
It’s 100 hours of gameplay!’
Like that’s the most important thing to know.
That was a metric in the early years, when the average gamer was 18 to 23.
And when you’re 18 to 23, you’re time rich and money poor.
Maybe you aren’t money rich, but you’re definitely time poor.
So I think our approach is a mismatch to that market, to reality.
I want more of those kinds of game moments, if we can bring down the scale and scope.
Let’s look at our obsession with photorealism, chasing that uncanny valley.
From what I’ve seen, it’s non-traversable.
Don’t chase that.
I think a photorealistic Mario would be kind of off-putting, frankly.
Or when they did that first Sonic draft for the Sonic movie with teeth.
Now the expectation is you could go in every house, open every drawer and everything is destructible.
And that’s nice, but it’s expensive to make that happen.
We have to look at that.
There’s so much money being put into making huge game experiences and people aren’t seeing it.
What would Coppola do if you walked out halfway through his movie?
We have to understand - is this a good use of resources?
Can consoles continue to exist, long-term?
Xbox is already publishing to multiple platforms, and now rival consoles.
Will PlayStation survive another 30 years just publishing on its own consoles and PC?
But with Xbox versus PlayStation, the Ali versus Frazier fight…
The jump from PS2 to PS3 was also remarkable.
We got to an HD standard.
We got - not all, but a lot of - 60fps gameplay.
It had a online grid capability, nascent though it was.
Then PS3 to PS4 was just, like, getting the web connection thing done right.
Consoles are never getting a big leap in power again?
Layden:I don’t think so.
I mean, what would that leap look like?
It would be perfectly-realised human actors in a game that you completely control.
That could happen one day.
I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime.
It’s all built by AMD.
I think we’re pretty much close to final spec for what a console could be.
It almost sounds like you’re calling a truce to the console wars.
[For our younger readers, Betamax was Sony’s less successful answer to VHS.]
Layden:[Laughs] Thanks to your dad.
We were just ‘expanding our offerings to our consumers to fit their lifestyle needs’.
But that’s what happened.
‘This is the technology we’re going to land on.
These are the specs around that tech that we’re going to agree to.’
- but the real competition will be on its content.
And content should be the competition for publishers, not which hardware you get behind.
Consoles are now getting mid-gen upgrades, which I feel further erodes those big generational steps.
We used fewer parts, you got a better, more compact footprint.
It was smaller and cheaper.
We have some abilities to take the current PS4 game library and juice it up'.
I think it worked really well on PS4.
I think it’s a connoisseur market, shall we say.
What are your thoughts there?
Layden:The two companies have always been close.
They’re not strangers, that’s for sure.
Layden:I don’t know what the business imperative would be to do that.
Playstation has been the leader for almost every generation it’s been in.
But in the end PlayStation fought to a tie in America and the UK.
As the saying goes, I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze.
How many additional sales would they get versus the brand impact, all the aggro?
I never understood that aggro but, you know, it’s there.
How about PlayStation games on Nintendo, then?
We’ve just seen Lego Horizon Adventures arrive there, which was a first.
It’s almost like a natural pairing.
It sounds like Sony might have finally forgiven Nintendo for leaving them at the altar.
Layden:You know, success is the best revenge.
