Shawn Layden has spoken at length about the inability of the video game business to reach new players, and how the recent studio acquisitions aren't going to help that.
The video game industry has been hit with a string of major acquisitions over the course of the last two years or so. Most notably by PlayStation and Xbox, and massive studios such as Epic and Tencent have also been buying up smaller competitors. Examples that have made the biggest waves include PlayStation's Insomniac acquisition, and Xbox teaming up with Bethesda.
Despite PlayStation being on the buying end of a lot of these deals, Shawn Layden, who was a Sony SIE CEO for 34 years, recently explained why these acquisitions are a bad thing. “Consolidation is the enemy of diversity in some ways. It takes a lot of playing pieces off the table as they grow into these larger conglomerates. And again, we end up with this problem with diversity,” he explained to GamesIndustry.biz.
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Layden highlights that despite the reports everyone is desperate to own the latest console, the number of console owners hasn't actually increased for about 25 years. That number falls somewhere between 240 and 260 million people. Bringing multiple studios under the same banner will homogenize ideas as they all work towards “the thing that you want to have done”.
“Over time, that is going to make the industry moribund, and it's going to create a world of sameness,” Layden goes on to say. That the industry will be condensed down to a handful of larger studios with all the smaller ones having been acquired. The games they release will have been created with a far narrower vision in mind, and if anything, their potential audience will become smaller rather than grow for the first time in the better part of three decades.
Layden describes a lot of issues with the current state of the industry in the interview, including his double down on the price hike some next-gen games have experienced. Layden previously commented on the price increase, revealing that it is nothing when compared to how much the cost of creating games increases with the introduction of each new generation of consoles.
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