Shawn Layden head of the Playstation division even said AAA gaming is unsustainable. No one can seriously say are more clued in than this guy, he's worked with Playstation from day 1, he was the head of Playstation for PS4 and development of the PS5, he's even cited as one of the architects of Sony's strategy of huge budget cinematic games.
And even he has been ringing the alarm bell the last few years, some quotes from him:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/shawn-layden-gamelab
"The problem with that model is it's just not sustainable," he said, explaining that the current generation has seen the cost of development reach between $80 million and $150 million for most AAA games -- excluding marketing costs -- with production taking up to five years from start to finish.
"I don't think that, in the next generation, you can take those numbers and multiply them by two and think that you can grow," he continued. "I think the industry as a whole needs to sit back and go, 'Alright, what are we building? What's the audience expectation? What is the best way to get our story across, and say what we need to say?'
"[AAA development] won't be less expensive than the current generation of game development," he said. "4K, HDR art and creating worlds don't come cheap.
And this is from a couple of years ago, development costs have skyrocketed way above even the numbers he's talking about here, lol. $80-$150 million he cited as being too high already, Spider-Man 2 is past $300 million, Starfield over 400 million, there's murmurs that GTAVI will actually be close to a billion dollars in initial budget and then another billion on top of that for additional content, lol. 5 year development times? Try 6-8 years now starting to become the norm for a lot of games.
This is a more recent tweet from Shawn Layden:
I reckon we're going to be hearing A LOT on this topic in 2024. 🤔 https://t.co/sH6Ar6EjVu
— shawn layden 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🇺🇸🇯🇵 (@ShawnLayden) January 3, 2024
PS4 tier games with some shiny bonus effects layered on top is basically going to become the most many studios can afford. And honestly that's fine. PS4 games already look realistic and nice enough and cost a fortune as is, what is the point of doubling/tripling your budget to $300 million, $400 million just to make it look a bit better. When even Insomniac games is saying they question why they even spent all the extra money on Spider-Man 2 for something a lot of gamers won't even really be able to notice you know there's a problem here.
That's the other issue too, these costs are not scaling linearly. Like going from PS1 to PS2, if you doubled the budget at least you got dramatically better visuals as a result of it and could really bank on that to sell your game. Today to go beyond PS3/PS4 tier visuals, just even a little bit costs a fortune. The closer you venture to photo real, the more you have to pay for much less of a leap.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 03 March 2024
