A former PlayStation exec says games would be better if we ended “this platform war” and had a “standard home console.” He explains that the Xbox and PlayStation consoles today are not different enough to justify this battle.
The lack of variety of content on console is detrimental to their future
It was during the IGN Live 2024 panel that Shawn Layden, former director of PlayStation Studios, spoke about the future of video games, and more particularly consoles. And his vision is quite interesting since, according to him, we must put an end to the console war. Here is what he answers when we ask him where he sees the world of consoles in ten years.
The games will cost $400 million and take seven years of development to create. So this is the kind of cash burn and excessive time required to get the product that will really be an albatross for the console experience.
If we can’t have a wider variety of content and because the games cost $200, $300, or $400 million to make, there’s not a lot of risk taking.
It’s one thing to put $10 million on the table and say “make it a star and see what happens”, but if you’re going to create an entirely new narrative experience about things we’ve never seen before and new characters, and you need $350 million to do it, there’s not a lot of CFOs and big companies that are going to write you a check.
According to him, the company will be more easily asked to create a Gears of War 7, for example, and all the big games that come out today are found more or less in the same categories. For Shawn Layden, this is not how new customers will be attracted to the console market.
He explains that it is not by continuing to play Call of Duty, Fortnite and other well-known games that those who do not already play on console will start playing it overnight. “The lack of variety in content is one of the biggest risks for the future. »
A unique living room console
Asked about how we will play video games in the future, Shawn Layden thinks that we have reached a point where there is no longer enough difference between consoles.
It feels like we’re in a similar moment to VHS and Betamax. Certainly, Nintendo is in its own lane and they are doing great things, and sometimes there is cross-platform, sometimes not. But I think we’ve gotten to a point now where, if you look at how similar the Xbox architecture and the Playstation architecture look, you open the box, and they’re both built by AMD, right?
There was a time when the architecture of the 360 compared to that of the PS3 was so different that we were sick of trying to go cross-platform compared to them, but today, as we said, only dogs can hear the difference.
Between these two tech devices, you know we’re talking about ray tracing differentials and most of us don’t actually have TVs [pour cela] […] so we don’t see the ray tracing anyway.
For him, the differences between large machines today are so small that it would be desirable to have only one device to plug in.
Either way, the Xbox, Playstation, and high-end PC have almost reached a plateau where, all things being equal, they’re pretty much the same. They’re pretty much the same and I think we’d live in a better world if we could just stick with standard home console technology that we could put it all together and end this platform war thing.
Earlier, Shawn Layden explained that there have always been around 250 million consoles in use around the world over the past few generations, and that that’s a problem. “We were still making money from the same people, without necessarily bringing new people into the console video game world. »
In essence, the former director of PlayStation Studios is therefore making the same speech as Microsoft in recent years, namely that to continue creating games that require considerable sums of money for many years, it is necessary to broaden the player base. This is what Microsoft did by releasing all its games on PC and, more recently, on PlayStation or Nintendo.
