Ex-PlayStation boss Shawn Layden: gaming industry too narrow to survive on GTA 6 alone

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Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden says that while GTA 6 will be monumentally huge, devs need to do more to appeal to people who don't care about the biggest AAA games.

Speaking to Kotaku , Layden says that for a potential PS6, iterative hardware that promises a bit of a higher framerate or better ray tracing isn't going to cut it, and that console makers need the software to justify spending money on a new console. "I think we’re already kind of limiting our reach just because of the games we’re building now. I mean, variety and range seem to be narrowing," Layden says, singling out popular genres like "a zombie apocalypse game, or it’s a space marine game, or it’s guys with really long swords and not much armor and dragons."

"Of course, Grand Theft Auto is going to be like an asteroid piercing the atmosphere and hitting the gaming universe with great force and power." Layden says, adding, "But there are a lot of people in the world who really don’t care about Grand Theft Auto, the non-gaming community."

He explains, "We talk about how big we are, $220 billion, $250 billion industry, but our social impact is the reverse. Everybody has a favorite song. That’s probably the least revenue-generating entertainment category, music, compared to gaming and film and television. But yet it has the widest impact."

Layden says, "gaming, it’s huge on the revenue side of things, but it’s a very select group that are doing it. We’re getting more money from the same people all the time and not necessarily bringing in new people into the experience."

He adds, "If these people who aren’t in the gaming experience have already said 'we don’t care about Call of Duty, we don’t care about Grand Theft Auto, we don’t care about Gran Turismo,' doing more of those same games is obviously not going to appeal to those people either."

Layden continues, "We need to bring out more games for more people, which means actually you have to have more people making games and in different places and different experiences. I want to find out what games from Uruguay look like and what kind of game designers we have in Bulgaria."

Granted, Layden's tenure as head of PlayStation was when Sony's first-party output began to focus on the cinematic third-person action game style that permeates its output today (or rather, did before Jim Ryan and Herman Hulst's live service pivots). And with the closure of the likes of Japan Studio, I think it's pretty unlikely Sony's output will be much more diverse in the future.

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