Through the PS4 and PS5 period, PlayStation has established itself as a vacation spot platform for unique collection like Spider-Man, God of Conflict, and The Final of Us. And now, former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden, who ran Sony’s gaming division from 2014 to 2019, has shared some ambivalent opinions on the character of console exclusives.
In an interview with GamesBeat from March 8, Layden talked about how cell gaming, dwell service video games, and free-to-play titles proceed to disrupt the game-making enterprise. Extra particularly, the publication requested the previous PlayStation CEO his ideas on rising the video games market, as corporations like Microsoft look to deliver its exclusives to consoles exterior of Xbox.
“When your prices for a sport exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel,” Layden advised GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi. “It reduces your addressable market. Notably if you’re on the earth of dwell service gaming or free-to-play. One other platform is simply one other approach of opening the funnel, getting extra folks in. In a free-to-play world, as we all know, 95% % of these folks won’t ever spend a nickel. The enterprise is all about conversion. It’s important to enhance your odds by cracking the funnel open. Helldivers 2 has proven that for PlayStation, popping out on PC on the identical time. Once more, you get that funnel wider. You get extra folks in.”
The price of AAA video games has ballooned within the final decade or so. Again in 2014, Activision Blizzard spent $500 million on the first-person live-service shooter Future. Because of a current leak, we discovered Insomniac Video games’ Spider-Man 2 value $300 million to make. Those self same paperwork, which got here to mild in December 2023, revealed that two different PlayStation exclusives, Guerrilla Video games’s motion RPG Horizon Forbidden West and Naughty Canine’s post-apocalyptic journey The Final of Us Half 2, value greater than $200 million. The price range for the upcoming GTA 6 has been reported to be as excessive as $2 billion. Builders have decried these prices as “not sustainable” for the trade at giant, and it seems as if as Layden agrees with the sentiment.
Nevertheless, he supplied a considerably contradictory assertion only a day later. Talking to the What’s Up PlayStation podcast on March 9, Layden mentioned that console exclusives have been a necessity for corporations as a result of they have been “key” to getting acknowledged by avid gamers, notably within the mid-to-late ‘90s (and even now).
“Exclusivity will at all times be essential, it helps focus and spotlight the options of your platform,” Layden mentioned on the podcast. “However, as your platform turns into established, and because the market acknowledges the place you sit in that pantheon of gaming choices, I feel the need of exclusivity turns into just a little bit much less.”
Kotaku has reached out to Sony and Layden for remark.
5 years after Layden’s tenure, PlayStation doesn’t appear too eager on altering its exclusivity technique. Positive, among the firm’s first-party video games, like Sony Bend Studio’s zombie-action sport Days Gone or Sucker Punch Productions’ open-world samurai sport Ghost of Tsushima, have made their option to PC, however none have been ported to a Nintendo or Xbox console but. On the identical time, although, Microsoft seems completely high quality with bringing its exclusives to PlayStation. Occasions are altering.
