Shawn layden interview When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel.

Petekilla

Veteran
16 Jun 2023
1,757
1,779
"Decimate the health of your platform for an extra 10% sales" 🤦‍♂️ that is literally cutting off the nose to spite the face

Making over a billion gross revenue on console isn't enough, but an extra 30m from PC is amazing and helped save the day 😐 WTF is wrong with these execs, this doesn't make any sense from any angle you look at it.


Idk why are ya’ll surprised. LMAO I’ve been telling ya’ll for months that Layden was the one who spearheaded PC ports. Ryan just picked up the pieces and went further with it. But this started under Layden, and he would have done the same thing Ryan did.
 

John Elden Ring

The Thread Maker
Content Creator
5 Jul 2022
6,457
7,942
United States
shawn-layden.jpg


Layden: Absolutely. When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel. It reduces your addressable market. Particularly when you’re in the world of live service gaming or free-to-play. Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in. In a free-to-play world, as we know, 95% percent of those people will never spend a nickel. The business is all about conversion. You have to improve your odds by cracking the funnel open. Helldivers 2 has shown that for PlayStation, coming out on PC at the same time. Again, you get that funnel wider. You get more people in.
For single-player games it’s not the same exigency. But if you’re spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell it to as many people as possible, even if it’s just 10% more. The global installed base for consoles–if you go back to the PS1 and everything else stacked up there, wherever in time you look at it, the cumulative consoles out there never gets over 250 million. It just doesn’t. The dollars have gone up over time. But I look at that and see that we’re just taking more money from the same people. That happened during the pandemic, which made a lot of companies overinvest. Look at our numbers going up! We have to chase that rocket!


Source
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Gediminas

Boy...
Founder
21 Jun 2022
7,577
9,288
Wrong. He admitted in an interview that he was responsible. The first PC port happened in 2020. Layden left in 2019, these ports don’t happen overnight. These things are always planned ahead.
yet again, he had no power. Kodera/Yoshida had. later Jim/Hulst, especially when first port was Horizon Zero Dawn, which came from EU and he was US division chef. but Hulst came from the same studio as Horizon and he was in power of all studios. and all Ports came after Jimbo/Hulst leadership.
 

Gamernyc78

MuscleMod
28 Jun 2022
20,386
16,652
All he saying is common sense shit "the more ppl that have your product, the more money you can make" I don't think anyone would disagree with a notion thts been proven and is just common sense.
 
  • Like
Reactions: peter42O

daniel5043

Veteran
19 Jan 2023
639
656
yet again, he had no power. Kodera/Yoshida had. later Jim/Hulst, especially when first port was Horizon Zero Dawn, which came from EU and he was US division chef. but Hulst came from the same studio as Horizon and he was in power of all studios. and all Ports came after Jimbo/Hulst leadership.
He was the Head of first party for a while
 

Systemshock2023

Veteran
8 May 2023
2,437
1,980
Very interesting interview. Echoes what I have been saying for a long time. Console gaming peaked in the 7th generation in terms of units and you can only make up nickel and dining existing users for a while. They have no choice but to reach more platforms if they want to show immediate growth to the shareholders.
 

Plextorage

Banned
26 Feb 2023
2,225
2,172


Wow they all must get the same propaganda Memo to push. What a pure disappointment of a man.


When your game costs 200 million to make and you still make a shitload of money, you're doing it well.

Looks like MS got another astroturfer.

"Decimate the health of your platform for an extra 10% sales" 🤦‍♂️ that is literally cutting off the nose to spite the face

Making over a billion gross revenue on console isn't enough, but an extra 30m from PC is amazing and helped save the day 😐 WTF is wrong with these execs, this doesn't make any sense from any angle you look at it.



Idk why are ya’ll surprised. LMAO I’ve been telling ya’ll for months that Layden was the one who spearheaded PC ports. Ryan just picked up the pieces and went further with it. But this started under Layden, and he would have done the same thing Ryan did.

The very ironic is what Layden said now is what he said few year ago :

I think we've done a lot over the last three or four years to get us to a place right now where we're building fewer games per year than ever before, but we're spending more time, more energy, certainly more money, on making them.

 

Yurinka

Veteran
VIP
21 Jun 2022
7,778
6,665


Wow they all must get the same propaganda Memo to push. What a pure disappointment of a man.

@JAHGamer @Nhomnhom moved it for you guys it was out of place but thts where the convo started :)

Well, this is the reason of why -as he said before- he (well, they because Shuhei Yoshida and Andrew House where in charge of PS Studios and SIE) started to push the PC ports strategy.

And well, he's right. Without keeping their focus out of PS, Sony needs to expand to PC and in the future, when possible, mobile.

Because to have over two dozen AAA games that cost over 250-300M each needs a lot of revenue to paid them, more than the one they generate in a single console.

He was the Head of first party for a while
No, the head of PS Studios (back then Worldwide Studios) was Shuhei Yoshida. Yoshida was president of PS Studios from 2008 to November 2019.

Shawn was chairman of PS Studios from March 2018 to September 30, 2019.
 
Last edited: