Former PlayStation Boss Believes Exclusivity Has Become AAA Development’s “Achilles’ Heel” Due to Ballooning Budgets

Exclusivity has become much less hard-and-fast than it was for so long in the games industry, to the extent that even first parties are now beginning to explore multiplatform releases. PlayStation games routinely show up on PC, and Xbox accelerated its multiplatform efforts with both PS5 and Switch releases with the likes of Sea of Thieves, Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, and Grounded.

Of course, given the staggering degree to which video game development costs have ballooned by this point, it’s no surprise that companies are trying to find more ways to sell more copies of games that are becoming increasingly more expensive to make. In fact, according to Shawn Layden – former CEO of Sony Worldwide Studios, who left PlayStation in 2019 – we’ve gotten to the point where, thanks to the aforementioned budgets, exclusivity has become AAA development’s “achilles’ heel.”

“When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel. It reduces your addressable market,” Layden said in a recent interview with GamesBeat. “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.”

Layden went on to add that though the situation isn’t exactly the same with single-player titles, multiplatform releases are still beginning to look attractive, even if the sales boost they provide might seem like a minimal one at glance. According to Layden, that comes down to the fact that the console market hasn’t really rgrown in three decades.

“For single-player games it’s not the same exigency,” he said. “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!”

So what’s the way forward? According to Layden, companies need to focus less on how to get more money out of the audience it already has, and start paying more mind to how to expand its audience by bring new people in.

“We’re not doing enough to get heretofore non-console people into console gaming,” he said. “We’re not going to attract them by doing more of the shit we’re doing now. If 95% of the world doesn’t want to play Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Grand Theft Auto, is the industry just going to make more Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Grand Theft Auto? That’s not going to get you anybody else.”