• Sony head Shawn Layden's plan for Playstation- fewer games, but bigger budgets
    40 replies, posted
https://www.cnet.com/news/sonys-shawn-layden-wants-fewer-bigger-playstation-games/ It ties in with them skipping E3. When we decided to take video games out of CES, back in 1995 during the PlayStation 1 era, E3 served two constituencies: retailers and journalists. Retailers would come in -- you'd see a guy come in, and he'd say, "I'm from Sears, and I handle Hot Wheels, Barbie, VHS and video games. So what are you about?" There was a huge educational component. Then you had journalists who had magazines and lead time and jockeying for position on the cover. And there was no internet to speak of. So a trade show at that time of year for this nascent industry was exactly what we needed to do. Now we have an event in February called Destination PlayStation, where we bring all retailers and third-party partners to come hear the story for the year. They're making purchasing discussions in February. June, now, is just too late to have a Christmas holiday discussion with retailers. So retail has really dropped off. And journalists now, with the internet and the fact that 24/7 there is game news, it's lost its impact around that.So the trade show became a trade show without a lot of trade activity. The world has changed, but E3 hasn't necessarily changed with it. And with our decision to do fewer games -- bigger games -- over longer periods of time, we got to a point where June of 2019 was not a time for us to have a new thing to say. And we feel like if we ring the bell and people show up here in force, people have expectation "Oh, they're going to tell us something." We are progressing the conversation about, how do we transform E3 to be more relevant? Can E3 transition more into a fan festival of gaming, where we don't gather there to drop the new bomb? Can't it just be a celebration of games and have panels where we bring game developers closer to fans?
The opposite of what the industry needs Just look at Nintendo for guidance Cheaper, more focused, more fine tuned
The current model is unsustainable, bigger games needs bigger budgets and as such needs a bigger margin of benefits for being profitable. The reason many AAA games are failing aren't exactly due rushing for competing against other games / genres, but because they need the money back asap ( which is the reason many focus on microtransactions, loot boxes and others ). Another reason that the games produced under the supervision of Sony are sucessful is that their teams had more "advantages" respect to others on the aspect of being able of having delays or more creative freedom. The second you squeeze them more, force them to do constant overtime, to implement a big number of features in short time and more, the final quality is going to be compromised. We need to scale down, to do not focus 24/7 on the available cutting edge of graphics and player interaction, to let the developers have better lives with a reasonable work time, and such.
less games, bigger budgets ≠ less games, better value
We need to go back to the 6th generation style of a fuck ton of medium sized games. Not the current state of tiny indies and gargantuan AAA.
Games like Spider-Man and God of War took long as hell to finally come out (showing up to several E3s) and now they want to just keep doing that? Why? Sure the games ended up being good but what happens if you spent a ton of money on a game and you get a dud? Having more games with smaller budgets should be way more common. Of course there's room for a big blockbuster title but there should be more variety.
To be frank, I think this is probably good for them. They are distinguishing themselves as the upper echelon of game quality in times when platforms (except Epic) are consolidating, small-medium sized games are everywhere and third party dominates the trend instead of exclusives. Playstation would become a proven brand that promises top-quality and separates itself from its competitors. They have proven that they have the budget to constantly pursue the latest tech even with their long ass development cycle. If their ballooning production cost can no longer be covered by their profits I'm sure they'll readjust their strategy. The bad I can see is that people are going to get tired waiting for their exclusives taking forever to come out only to find them clinging to same-old "safe designs but packing amazing details". Gargantuan projects sitting in the oven for too long are extremely dangerous to the game, money and the devs, I must say, but they've shown that they can handle it. Elitist as heck, though.
Not sure I really approve of this but also giving Bloodborne 2 infinite money can't be a bad thing
Putting all the eggs in one basket. There's totes no way this can go wrong. Realtalk, we need more A and AA-tier games. Enough funding to be impressive but not so much that if the wide sales projection is missed by a mil or so that the whole development team goes under. Enough that mild risks can be taken. The closest stuff we've had to this are games funded by Patreon, which is incredibly hit or miss - for every Dusk, you have a Mighty No. 2. I won't be playing these exclusives like Death Standing, anyways, as much as I would like to play Hideo's next game. I'm afraid I chose a XB1 due to prioritizing XB360-era games as that system had a lot of exclusives I always wanted to play for myself. It's funny, I remember people meming a decade ago that the PS3 had no games. Now Microsoft is on the receiving end of the meme. Shucks.
I’m getting a weird sense of deja vu here.
How the fuck do you look at an industry with such massively bloated budgets that you either need to set impossible sales targets or nickle and dime your customers every way you can and think 'yep, we need more of this'?
Can't wait for one of them to "fail" and Sony's stock plummets
So we're going to just end up with more games trying to expand upon other elements from a gameplay standpoint that has absolutely no place in its design? If focusing on bigger titles means we get all of our hybrid-rpg-fps-horror-open-world-immersive-sim barf that has been plaguing AAA for the past few years no thanks. Refining a strong base section of gameplay and expanding it impresses more more compared to feature bloat which seems to be the standard today. KH3 suffered from this heavily and it divided the fanbase. I want to play 'games' not watch a high budget intractable cgi film. Thats fine as a genre to explore in games, but its becoming a standard for nearly everything released that everything feels like too much to take in I couldn't get past the first mission in Watch Dogs 2 because it ended up trying to be too big and preachy in terms of its scale and message that it just falls flat. I don't want all of these expanded universes that are like MCU in video games anymore, its happening to nearly every new game where if you do not have a full on franchise ready to sell with micro-transactions and a year or two of expanded dlc, you're ruined. At the end of the day its not even about the games anymore but the spectacle and money dumped into things like PS Experience, E3, etc. because to me at least, everyone cares about the hype but once the game comes out it dies out after a couple weeks. Since when was gaming about hype and no longer the gaming? Just how much of my money actually funds development and not all of the marketing that is being done now today?
Unless they start funding indies too this is just feels a bad decision.
Sony has made a lot of good decision with their first party games so I don't think we can really fault them here. It obviously worked this gen. Also, yeah, Nintendo has Indies and Sony has some too but Nintendo doesn't have RDR2 selling 24million copies so Sony doesn't really need indie games. Plus, it's always something they can work on in the future.
Exclusives do sell consoles, but only if they're able to keep pace with 3rd parties and/or indies. This just reads like Sony forgot that second bit, and that they feel they're so good at the first bit that the Sony "brand" of exclusives alone will be enough to market the next console. A Death Stranding game with high budgets and fully explored dev time is good/compelling for the industry, sure, but not every game has to be a Death Stranding, Sony. Essentially, tl;dr, Sony is becoming arrogant again. Expect another PS3 scenario for next gen.
I can't wait for "PS5 has no games" and every images is a rehash of feels guy, pepe, and wojak.
"Fewer games, bigger budgets, no anime tiddies" There, fixed. :P
I mean yes, and no. Like for instance, yes we should not be putting out a new far cry/call of duty/whatever every single year. But also, having more budget does not equate to having more sales and enthusiasm. If you put out one major title a year and dump all your money in to making it the best shit ever you're still not going to get the astronomical fucking sales numbers the industry thinks it 'needs' to be successful. The games industry could be so much fucking better if it would just accept that they don't need to make huge fucking blockbusters because tbh I don't think gamers are very impressed by most of them anymore. I want mid budget titles that can afford to fail. Because that leads to more risks, and higher rewards when everyone goes fucking nuts over something. They should be making their own Undertales because tbh if a game that had a budget of 50k came to be considered one of if not the best game ever AND sell over 3 million copies, you should be trying to do that all the time, because that is such high reward for such low risk at least by the standards of a big company like sony.
Big eyes and people who have lost all business sense.
The arguments they are using are pretty sound, they don't want a short changed game like BFV or worse FO76. Basically they don't want to be EA and hammer out games to meet shareholder/investor expectations. This means longer development cycles and thus more money. Social media rips into bad games now to the point where the silent majority has taken notice.
One thing I think a lot of people don't know about is that Rareware in its primetime came from Nintendo giving them essentially an unlimited budget. They reverse engineered the Famicom and Nintendo was so impressed, they just gave Rare an essentially unlimited budget to make games for them. I don't think more money alone will solve it, rather, better dev cycles which the money can allow.
God of War, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us and Spider-Man PS4 went to their fucking brains. Last thing we need is a repeat of the PS3 era as mentioned before, or worse yet trading off with Xbox next generation for the more relevant console overall. Maybe that's why that patent happened - to give them footing in case this falls through. I would sooner take twenty games that are just plain fun and have a solid weight of content, even if they've got small budgets, than five $60 triple-A games that try to be big and cinematic.
I mean, we wouldn't have Dreams if this wasn't policy already which looks incredibly promising and fun. In this one facet; I trust Sony. And longer cycles without massive upsets in development always mean better quality products and also more controlled and comfortable dev cycles. Crunch and etc.
I'm sure this plan worked very well for the PS Vita.
Can't wait for sony to release the Xbox One: Two
So is this gonna result in more faux-artsy games where a dad runs through a forested environment with some generic combat, a crafting system and an open world wrapped around it because that's the safest gameplay option to pick?
they'll turn tomb raider into a mom
Mom Raider
you missed the opportunity for the obvious womb raider joke, come on now.
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