Shawn Layden: 'The games industry needs to show some patience'

Tencent advisor and former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden has criticised the games industry's lack of patience during this period of widespread layoffs.

Layden's comments came during the opening podcast for GI Sprint, which is a new series of videos, podcasts and articles around the subject of making video games cheaper, faster and better. The full podcast goes live later today.

The current industry situation, which has seen tens of thousands of redundancies across the business, has been caused by slow growth and rapidly rising costs. And Layden says a side effect has been impatience from games companies when it comes to new ideas and concepts.

"That's the real frustrating thing when you see people say 'look here's a small studio that made a great game, it has true promise, it created an entirely new gaming experience, but we don't have the patience to play this thing out into part two or part three'," he began.

"Even though they didn't really get wiped out by it, they didn't have the windfall profits they expected and so they just kill this thing and go for more established AAA IP, sequels, copycats, and things that from a financial perspective you can draw a through line and say if we build this game it likely perform like this in the market. When you bring completely new things that people have not seen before, which may be fantastic and quite often are, the publishing industry doesn't have patience now to nurture these things, and they feel they need the quick big win. And that's a terrible place to be in an entertainment and creative industry."

Layden says it is ultimately the new ideas that will be what gets the industry – particularly the AAA console industry - out of its current predicament, not established brands and franchises.

"The vast majority of the planet has already said Grand Theft Auto is not that interesting, Call of Duty is not that interesting," Layden says. "They were both huge hits in our in our little village of gamers, of course.

"If people have already said they're not interested in that experience, building more of those experiences will not get them in. It seems pretty axiomatic to me."

He continues: "How does the entertainment industry continue to grow and expand and reach new people? And to my mind that's through innovation and through bringing out new kinds of games. So okay, you don't like first-person shooters and you don't like RPGs, here's something else, here's a rhythm action gaming piece that's all about music and bright colours and having a good time. Where's the space for those games? And how do we continue to provide outreach to get new people involved in the interactive entertainment world?"

"We went through this time of artificial growth during the pandemic, and I would have expected more companies to recognize that it was a limited time party"

He adds that patience works both ways, too. Game companies need to show patience when nurturing new ideas, but also patience when reacting to what's going on in the market, citing the industry's over-excitement during the lockdown years.

"We went through this time of artificial growth during the pandemic, and I would have expected more companies to recognize that this is a very limited time party people," he tells us. "Make hay while the sun shines, but don't make huge investments against what you think is a never ending 20% growth rate year on year, because that's not continuing. But people got excited in the moment. They didn't want to miss the opportunity, and so you bulk up. None of us knew how long the pandemic was going to last or lockdown was going to last, so I guess you do make investments to try to jump on the potential that that may be longer than it turned out to be. But that's a huge gamble. You're betting on the comet, and if it doesn't happen then you're stuck out of position with a huge labour load.

He continues: "It's human nature, right? If you're at the craps table and someone's got the hot hand and they're running the table… you just want to jump on that train and get a piece of that before it goes. That's why patience is the thing that's important. The industry is losing patience. It's 'we need to find a way to solve this problem in six months' in an industry where nothing gets done in six months.

Layden says it's ultimately the smaller studios and companies who suffer the most, who may have been acquired during this period of excess with the promise of creative freedom, only to find themselves having to cut back because of growth concerns by their parent company.

"They say we love the creatives and we're going to let them do their thing and build the great games. 'You're the experts on that, we just want to help you realize your goal'. That's fine and good. But the minute the money thing gets a bit tight across the whole enterprise, all of a sudden the companies come back to all the studios and say we're in a tough spot, we're going to miss are profitability targets, so everybody's got to take a haircut," Layden explains. "And some of the smallest studios are going: 'why do I need the haircut? You bought me for a little bit of money to give me some freedom to do the thing I do… I didn't tell you to spend double digit billions of dollars on buying other stuff, which means all of a sudden we will be the sacrificial lamb because you've got to make that balance sheet work.'

"It's not a true offer when they say: 'we're going to buy you and give you all of your autonomy… unless, of course, our other financial agencies force us to close you'."