People didn't buy his pet peeves projects like Concrete Genie & Dreams.
To be fair, Dreams was greenlighted before Shawn became chairman of what today is PS Studios, he was in charge of the SCEA subsidiary (in charge of sales and marketing, not development). And was released after he left Sony, under Jim Ryan and Hermen Hulst.
The smaller projects he backed flopped, that's just the market speaking not the execs.
The difference with Ryan is that these smaller (creative) titles are outsourced under Yoshida and in my opinion delivered much better results like Kena, Stray, Sifu, Humanity etc. there is quite a list of these with more obscure stuff no one played like Season's A letter to the Future. And these are often released on Extra which ironically shows that people ask for these but don't even play them when even ''free'' cause those same people simply don't mention it like it doesn't exist!
Yes. But well, most of these games aren't expected to be supersellers. They have a role of catalog fillers to appeal certain specific niches.
I like Layden but let's not act the 220 million budget for LoU2 wasn't greenlit under him, or the PC ports or the California centric management that has started under him. I will say what I do agree with him not every project needs to make insane amount of money and more artistic projects like Last Guardian for your portfolio & prestige is worth beyond spreadsheet financials.
Another one greenlighted under Shawn was the TLOUP1 remake, which when promoted Hermen saw it, didn't like it and thought they were spending a too high budget for it.
The only difference is in this era it's often a wrap for the studio cause you don't get another 4-5 years with a budget from publishers if it bombs, basically I call it the THQ level of game publishing has disappeared in the industry but IMO that's more on the devs for abysmal products.
Well, THQ continues there publishing games under Embracer. There are many AA games today, I think Embracer is a good example of them because they release many AA games.
I did quite like Returnal, lately many large games are missing the most important element called fun. Hell divers 2 is hybrid in that sense, smaller game still GAAS. And before it's novelty wore off it was allot of fun. But your acting as if I'm pro Layden, I'm not. Playstation is a large company and they have already had success before him. Don't forget we are consumers we play games, not executives.
@Yurinka Shawn didn't buy the studio, that was the issue. Not working with the studio. PS has worked with many other studios and if they didn't deliver the cooperation ended.
They didn't buy arrowhead but did
buy a unproven studio.
They killed last of us GaaS game but did released concord.
It was a good idea to buy Firewalk because they have a ton of top tier talent who worked on games like Destiny, CoD and several other top tier shooters or AAA games.
A Sony hero shooter from Destiny and CoD devs was a good pitch specially when greenlighted back in 2016 or 2018. Back then nobody could expect it was going to tank as hard as they did.
They are a way more proven team by far than Arrowhead is, and specially as Arrowhead were back then. At some point Sony said they decided to pause acquisitions for the mid term (meaning, they may resume it late next year or in 2026, which is around when they'll get the cash from selling their banks division). So maybe they didn't acquire Arrowhead because of that. Or maybe because Arrowhead didn't want to sell.
And well, Shawn was only chairman of WWS (PS Studios) for a year and a half. The president of WWS at his time, the one who took the important decisions for first and second party games, was Shuhei Yoshida. Plus the SIE CEO, the one signing the contracts, deals and acquisitions were House and Kodera, and more recently Jim Ryan.
I think you guys overstimate Shawn, because the was the public face / salesman in the E3 shows when he was in charge of the sales & marketing subsidiary of SIE for America.
They killed last of us GaaS game but did released concord.
Naughty Dog decided to kill TLOU Online, not the PS Studios head or SIE CEO.
Yes, they decided to release Concord, yes. And to kill it a few days later.
