Former PlayStation CEO, Shawn Layden, has recently commented on his distain for the current state of the gaming industry and how limited “middle-of-the-road” releases have become. Layden spoke with the co-founder of Raw Fury, Gordon Van Dyke, at Gamescom Asia and stated:
In the past we spent a lot more time looking at games and not asking ‘what’s your monetisation scheme’, or ‘what’s your recurrent revenue plan’, or ‘what’s your subscription formula’? We asked the simple question: is it fun?…That middle piece is gone. If you [can become] AAA, you survive, or if you do something interesting in the indie space, you could. But AA is gone. I think that’s a threat to the ecosystem.
Layden centered his observations around the idea that the objective in developing games was to make them fun. Since the floor of entry is lower than most other industries in the entertainment field, studios used to be willing to take bigger swings.
Today, the entry costs for making a AAA game is in triple digit millions now. I think naturally, risk tolerance drops. And you’re [looking] at sequels, you’re looking at copycats, because the finance guys who draw the line say, ‘Well, if Fortnite made this much money in this amount of time, my Fortnite knockoff can make this in that amount of time.’ We’re seeing a collapse of creativity in games today [with] studio consolidation and the high cost of production.
To bolster his claims, statistics show that indie games grossed $4 billion on Steam from January 2024 to September 2024 and accounts for around 48% of all full-game revenue on the platform while AA and AAA titles joint together make up the other 52%. Layden believes that a lot of AA developers are too concerned with replicate the formulas of the AAA titles rather than making fresh and innovative concepts while finding niche fandoms and communities to invest in the AA titles.