2y ago

Ex-PlayStation Boss Has A Warning For The Game Industry

kotaku.com

17 comments

Avoiding the sites ads and other garbage, I fed the url through the Kagi summarizer ("key moments" mode); here's the output, verbatim:
Shawn Layden, former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, has concerns about rising costs, consolidation in the industry, and game preservation.
Consolidation through acquisitions can reduce creativity as studios are absorbed into larger companies and projects.
Blockbuster games requiring huge budgets and long development times are risky and could limit creativity.
The focus on only a few popular genres may prevent gaining new players who are not interested in those genres.
Preservation of older games is important culturally but the industry has no unified effort to make past games widely accessible.
Backwards compatibility has improved but many games from platforms like PS3 remain difficult to play on new consoles.
Layden worries large acquisitions could reduce the number of creative voices as smaller studios are absorbed.
The entry of tech giants like Google, Netflix, Apple and Amazon could disrupt the game industry.
Layden believes companies need to take more risks, find broader appeal, and develop more sustainable business models.
While some acquisitions save studios, Layden remains concerned about the long-term impact on creativity within the industry.
- I think as chairman of world wide studios beside shun yoshida, he hasn't done a bad job. Game that came out that time were good and at least a bit more creative than at the moment. So i understanding to be more risky is a good point.
  But he tells us now for years, that games get more and more expensive and i think he was as well responsible for very expensive games, like the naughty dog games. So does he think this popular games were a mistake?
- This summary is about as long as the article.
  
  No ads, 'read this!', 'watch this video', slide-out bullshit though. I got two paragraphs in and the text was like 1/4 of my phone screen, the rest were ads/links/slide-out offers. Fuck allllll that noise.
It would be great if Sony would commit to its own creative endeavors.
The PSVR suite has some great potential, but outside of like… 3? first party games, it doesn’t have anything that you can’t find elsewhere. And for the titles that are available on other platforms, they tend to be updated more frequently or are otherwise more feature rich elsewhere. There’s a lot of power behind the platform, but almost nothing to use it for.
PSVR 2 is not compatible with PSVR1 from the PS4, so all of your accessories and games don’t carry over.
The newly updated Meta Quest 3 can run standalone or linked up to a computer. I don’t expect Sony to ever open up compatibility outside of its ecosystem, but history has shown that Sony is fine with abandoning ideas that don’t immediately print money.
- VR is dead in the water. It has always had serious flaws as a consumer product, but now the public opinion forming around the "metaverse" concept is the final nail in the coffin.
  I reckon Apple might be able to give AR a shot, but that won't have any effect on the gaming industry.
  Just my predictions as a nobody. I'm sure many will disagree...
- If PSVR2 was PC compatible I probably would have bought it by now.
  If it has a better library I'd be at least considering it. I'd like to play Horizon, but that's not worth spending over $500 for. Gran Turismo 7 would be intriguing (both VR and regular) if it didn't have micro-transactions.
  Honestly the library issue kind of applies to the whole console. I kind of understand that the pandemic led to more cross-gen games, and multi-platform games are good for the industry as a whole. But I'm still not seeing a lot of reasons to buy a PS5 on this list. The list disregards PC versions, which I kind of get because Sony is publishing AAA games on PC and you often need to spend 3x the cost of a PS5 to get a PC powerful enough to run them. But some of these indie games like Stray and Tchia feel like a stretch.
  
  I share your thoughts. Feels like for better or worse, this generation has exceedingly few true console exclusives. The Xbox ecosystem offers more sales in my corner of the world plus the option for gamepass if you’re so inclined, so it seems like a better value.
  I finally picked up a PS5 on sale for a family holiday gift. I originally wanted to grab one for VR, but the longer I hold off, the more I’m seeing that it’s simply not a competitive package for that gaming space. I don’t have a gaming computer, so I’m limited to a few options, but for what my kids are interested in, a Quest 3 just offers more.
  It’s kind of dumb. I want to spend my money on VR, but I don’t want to waste it. It’s a bit of a catch-22 where the ecosystem needs supporters now to grow, but people like myself don’t want to support it because it hasn’t grown (to meet the competition’s offerings, anyways)

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