The landscape of video games and the budgets have become quite the conversation, as seen by the massive number of layoffs between Xbox and Sony. The PlayStation brand is the center of conversation, as the former CEO, Shawn Layden, shared some thoughts about the company he oversaw from 2014 to 2019, where he departed due to an internal power struggle with outgoing CEO Jim Ryan.

Now serving as a strategic advisor for Tencent since 2022, he spoke in an interview with VentureBeat about Playstation's ballooning budgets and an inability to meet consumer demand.

"When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel," Layden believes. "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."

Layden brought up the success of Helldivers II, released February 8th, to resounding success as its launch on both PlayStation 5 and PC, claiming the top spot on Steam's player charts, in both sales and active users. It still currently resides in the top 5. This same mentality, in his eyes, doesn't apply to PlayStation's previous reliance on the single player exclusive games.

"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!"

With PlayStation's modus operandi being investing heavy funding for sizable AAA games like Horizon Forbidden West ($212 million dollars, while netting nearly 8 and a half million unit sales), on top of buying Destiny developer Bungie and manufacturing of a new model PlayStation 5, the mission statement has clearly come at a rapid change, but how soon before PlayStation will see the benefits of an about-face? The company sits atop the gaming world as industry leaders, but at what cost?

SOURCES: Venturebeat