Former Sony Exec Worries Creativity Will Stagnate Due To AAA Sequels & Free Games

I’ve talked about Shawn Layden before. And in admiring terms, too. In the wake of the much of the industry consolidation we saw in the video game space last year, his comments about both what that would mean for creativity within gaming, the creation of entirely new titles, and even moreso what he said about the need for preservation within the industry, I nodded my head along with him.

Well, Layden is back in public again, once again worrying aloud about creativity in the industry. Except this time I think some of that worrying is overwrought.

“It’s a $250 billion global business but the actual number of players doesn’t grow at the same pace,” Layden said in his Gamescom Asia interview with Gordon Van Dyke. “So we’re getting more money from the same people. You need to get more people playing games. How do you do that? We need to get more people making games.” He suggested companies look to empower up-and-coming developers in growing markets like Indonesia and India.

As the Kotaku post goes on to note, there are actually plenty of outlets for this kind of creativity. Granted, there are more examples of them in the PC gaming space than on consoles, but that is starting to change as well. Indie titles, or so-called AA titles (as opposed to AAA), are appearing on gaming consoles more and more these days.

Last year it was Remnant II, a Dark Souls-infused loot shooter. This year it’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, a shooter attached to a big franchise that nevertheless manages to deliver a great-looking game on a budget that was less than half that of Doom Eternal. Maybe next year it will be Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a French Impressionist riff on the Final Fantasy turn-based RPG formula that looks great for its surprising $50 price point.

So, okay, some of this might be coming from a former console boss who’s no longer in the business. And while his desire for creative output and more diverse titles is laudable, any cries of lament for an industry that is still churning out a ton of new content seems a bit dramatic for my tastes.

But when he talked about the creativity needed in the industry, and what he saw as standing in its way, one quote stood out to me.

“If we’re just going to rely on the blockbusters to get us through, I think that’s a death sentence,” he said during an interview with Gordon Van Dyke, co-founder of the indie publisher Raw Fury, at Gamescom Asia this week, according to Gamesindustry.biz. The ex-PlayStation executive blamed nine-figure development costs for less willingness among big publishers to take risks. The result is games getting greenlit based on how well their revenue can be modeled instead of whether they feel fun and innovative.

“You’re [looking] at sequels, you’re looking at copycats, because the finance guys who draw the line say, ‘Well, if Fortnite made this much money in this amount of time, my Fortnite knockoff can make this in that amount of time,’” Layden said.

Huh. How far we have come. You may recall that there was a time, not too long ago, where all kinds of folks in the so-called copyright industries were talking about how “you cannot make money with free.” A product given away for free, they argued, could not make the kind of money that a tightly protected, non-free product would make. And these comments were focused on the digital media industries.

Well, apparently now the thought pendulum has swung all the way in the opposite direction. Here you have a former console executive saying that some free games, like Fortnite, are so profitable that the finance guys want so many more of them that it’s impeding on creative output.

Now, I don’t know that to be actually true. I’m fairly steeped in the gaming industry generally and I don’t see anything remotely like a dearth of creativity. But it is interesting to see just how much the views of some executives on the topic of free games has changed.