And why Lego Horizon Adventures is coming to Switch.
Perhaps hundreds of millions.
Music and movies, they can be enjoyed by almost limitless audiences.
And to kind-of gate the audience for that at 20 or 30 million frustrates me.
I would love to see a world where hundreds of millions of people can enjoy those games."
There is a problem with this vision, which Ryan acknowledges when he mentions ‘the current console model’.
The audience for games consoles hasn’t grown bigger in decades.
For PlayStation in particular, it has never gone much beyond 150m.
PlayStation wants to make its games more popular.
It wants to turn its franchises into real entertainment powerhouses.
But more than that, it needs to do it.
Development costs have (in some cases) tripled over the past five years.
I’m picking on PlayStation because they’ve just announced thatLego Horizon Adventuresis coming to Nintendo Switch.
A PlayStation-owned IP launching on a rival console is unheard of.
You’d have to turn back the clock to 1998 and Wipeout 64 to find another.
But of course, this isn’t purely a PlayStation thing.
Xbox, PlayStation and
Nintendo effectively have two parts to their business: platform and IP.
The platform business is everything from hardware sales, accessory sales, subscriptions and store sales.
It made money from each game sold.
But for console makers, this is the key challenge.
Its main focus has been expanding its franchises to PC and mobile.
It’s also expanding its franchises via TV and film.
And the firm has been strategically releasing selected titles on PS5 and Switch.
Nintendo has shown no interest in putting its brands on its direct rivals.
It’s also making early moves into creating mobile games too.
For a lot of companies, mobile is the biggest opportunity.
The challenge, as is often the case with mobile, is how this audience pays for their games.
It’s a free-to-play market, which doesn’t typically sit well with premium AAA console games.
The Lego game is part of this strategy.
Sony will have evaluated this move and deemed it largely additive.
The risk is low.
Well, why not try one of the main games on PlayStation?'.
By contrast, an Xbox version of the game isn’t as appealing.
But even it is being selective and strategic with the games it picks.
Take Sea of Thieves and Grounded, which are live-service games that benefit greatly from more players.
Or the Ori games, which are in a genre - Metroidvania - that is hugely popular on Nintendo.
In the future, we should expect to see more games crop up in surprising places.
And there is likely to be some tension behind the scenes over what is right for each game.
Consoles are not about to disappear, and neither are exclusives, not completely.
Christopher Dring runsGamesIndustry.biz, Eurogamer’s sister publication all about the business of video games.
