Former PlayStation Boss: Developing AAA Games Has Become Unsustainable; Games Are Becoming Too Long and a Mismatch to the Market
[summaraize]
The high costs of making AAA games are nothing new. Big titles like Starfield, Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, and the Call of Duty series have production budgets in the hundreds of millions—sometimes even more than those of major Hollywood films. The gaming industry has been debating the sustainability of this trend for some time. Now, Shawn Layden, former boss of PlayStation Studios, has clearly stated that this approach is simply not sustainable.
Shawn Layden, who for years was one of the key figures behind Sony Interactive Entertainment, opened up about the rising costs of AAA games in a recent interview with Eurogamer. Layden argues that the audience for console gaming is not growing at a rate fast enough to justify these sky-high budgets.
Games Are Becoming Too Long and Mismatched to the Market and Reality
According to Layden, the younger generation of potential gamers is being drawn away by platforms like TikTok, leading to a situation where developers and hardware manufacturers are increasingly relying on a shrinking pool of existing gamers to support their expensive ventures. As a result, Layden believes the industry faces two critical issues that need urgent attention: the rising costs of AAA game development, and the fact that these games are becoming too long, creating a mismatch to the market and reality.
Layden explained,
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. It goes exponentially. The PS4 generation, which was the last I was associated with, game dev was 150m if you want to be top of the line, and that’s before marketing. So by that math, PS5 games should eventually reach $300m to $400m – and that is just outright not sustainable.
To help reduce the rising costs, Layden suggests a possible solution: shortening the length of AAA games. He argues that it no longer makes sense to design titles that span 80, 90, or even 100 hours, especially considering that the average age of gamers has shifted to around 30 years old, as opposed to the younger audience of 18-23 that dominated the previous generation. He proposes that games should ideally have no more than 23 hours of engaging gameplay—shorter, but still captivating enough to keep players hooked.
He further explained,
It’s like we’re at the end of the 18th century, and we’re realising that building cathedrals is really expensive. 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? I’m afraid we’ve built AAA gaming into a kind of cathedral business, and it just can’t grow any further. In fact, it’s probably grown too far already.
Layden’s comments make him one of the first top industry figures to openly admit that the current way of making AAA games is not sustainable, especially when it comes to exclusive titles. This was shown by the failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which lost Warner Bros. $200 million.
Even with these signs of trouble, the trend of spending large amounts on AAA games doesn’t seem to be slowing down. As long as games like Spider-Man 2, which cost an estimated $350 million, continue to do well, many companies will likely keep following the same approach.
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