Former Sony exec says focusing on high-budget blockbusters is 'a death sentence' for the games industry

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Lincoln started writing about games while convincing his college professors to accept his essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress, eventually leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte.

Speaking at Gamescom Asia, former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden offered a grim diagnosis for the state of the games industry: AA studios have disappeared, and rising development costs have left the industry in a creative death spiral (via

Since then, however, the costs of AAA game development have grown exponentially, creating a risk-averse industry environment where publishers are unwilling to back anything that isn't deemed a guaranteed blockbuster success."Back then you didn't make a game for millions dollars, so your risk tolerance was fairly high," Layden said."Today, the entry costs for making a AAA game is in triple digit millions now. I think naturally, risk tolerance drops.

According to Layden, that relentless push towards AAA development trends has wiped out a middle ground that once existed between the biggest-budget studios and indie developers."That middle layer that used to be where Interplay, Gremlin, Ocean, THQ, all those companies, made their money... That middle piece is gone. If you AAA, you survive, or if you do something interesting in the indie space, you could," Layden said."But AA is gone. I think that's a threat to the ecosystem.

While I'm a bit more optimistic about the state of the AA space, I share Layden's hope of getting"a bit more interest and excitement and exposure" for lower budget, unconventional game projects."If we're just going to rely on the blockbusters to get us through, I think that's a death sentence," Layden said.

 

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