Ex-PlayStation Executive Explains the State of the Gaming Industry

The gaming industry has been kinda crazy in the last few years.

Many game development studios and publishers have been focusing on other things besides making fun games, and it is affecting the industry as a whole.

I say this because of how often we see a new release or title that is overpriced, over-monetized, a buggy mess, an unwanted remaster, an asset flip, or just bad.

Honestly, gaming is just not as exciting anymore and I’m not saying this because I grew old and stopped liking games. It’s just that we keep getting the same thing over and over again from the companies who used to create something new and fun every so often.

Almost as if creativity has been going downhill and these studios have decided to throw “fun” out of the window to pursue something else.

Well…it turns out that might be the case.

I say that because, in a post by Pushsquare.com, Shawn Layden (an ex-PlayStation executive) was at Gamescom Asia and expressed how creativity has “collapsed” throughout the industry due to games becoming more expensive to create.

Throughout the article, he mentioned how making games used to be about fun while now it’s all about monetization.

As a gamer, I have felt this change over time.

When I was in high school, playing a video game used to be a memorable experience because I was not just reading or watching someone else’s story, I was participating in it and even influencing the outcome.

Not a single piece of entertainment could do this, which made me love video games more than any TV show, movie, or book, but it wouldn’t have been the same if those games were boring.

It’s because they were made with fun as the priority that I enjoyed them as much as I did.

I wasn’t the only person who felt this way, since gaming became one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, and that doesn’t happen if people don’t like the products that come out of it, which in this case were video games.

As time passed, however, I started to see a steady decline in the quality of games as a result of executives who don’t understand the industry monetizing everything they can or big publishers buying successful game development studios only to butcher them a few years later.

It was sad and enraging to see.

According to Layden, the reason why creativity is down is that games have become increasingly expensive to make, so studios and publishers are not willing to take as many risks as they used to and often choose to “play it safe”.

I do believe this is true and would explain why many recent games are either sequels, remasters of already successful titles, or clones of a game from the competition.

Also, the line about the Fortnite knockoff is very true. When other companies saw how successful this game was, many tried to make their own Battle Royale and most of them became irrelevant some time later.

This is a trend we see all the time.

A studio makes a successful game, others want to make their own version of it, and expect to get the same results.

While competition is good in any space, innovation is needed to stand out, but that requires them to take certain risks, and as we have seen so far, that seems to be something they are actively avoiding, which makes it no surprise that many recent games from big publishers are either boring or soulless.

Lastly, we have a bit of a hot take by Layden saying that AA games cannot survive in today’s market.

This is not something I can agree with after seeing the success of some of the best games the industry has ever had.

I’m talking about games like:

• Palworld
• Space Marine 2
• Hades
• Undertail
• Stray
• A Plague Tale: Innocence
• Another’s Crab Treasure
• Sifu
• Hollow Night

Just to name a few.

These are all AA games that are memorable and fun, so budgets shouldn’t be a problem to make a title that players won’t regret buying.

Final Thoughts

The decline in creativity in the gaming industry has been pretty evident for a while and these statements by Shawn Layden give a clearer picture of why this is happening, but I don’t think budgets are the only reason.

We constantly see cases of massive layoffs, big companies buying smaller gaming studios and closing them later, activists using games to push their ideals, toxic positivity that makes it impossible to have a productive discussion, and executives who don’t know what they are doing trying to make as much money as possible by squeezing the players and their franchises.

The sum of all of these things is what is damaging the industry and it’s only going to get worse unless companies get their shit together.

Until that day comes, I’ll continue to support the single and double A titles that seem to know what they are doing.

That’s all for today.