"There comes a time when we all declare the war is over": Former PlayStation Studios boss Shawn Layden on the future of video game consoles
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Then when will Sony stop paying studios to not port their game to platforms other than PlayStation, regardless of time gate? This has been Sony's playbook since the beginning of their gaming venture, I don't see them stopping any time soon.
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Then when will Sony stop paying studios to not port their game to platforms other than PlayStation, regardless of time gate? This has been Sony's playbook since the beginning of their gaming venture, I don't see them stopping any time soon.
I do see them stopping soon. Those deals are benefiting basically no one anymore. Partners like Square Enix are doing way better by putting their games on PC without an exclusivity period. Sony's not growing their console business over the previous generation, even when their competition has been destroyed. At some point it's just money down the drain.
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There is a mythical "Sony fan" customer who pays extra for their video game consoles, and justified that by believing it comes with a right to be special and awesome and play games no one else is allowed to.
It's a pantomine of a Nintendo fan, who pays for an underpowered console for first-party games that use unique controllers. None of whom would ever complain if their games were sold on PC so long as they could bring the controller over.
AFAIK, the only real people who want exclusives on PlayStation are Sony employees and shareholders.
I know there WERE Sony fans who would get upset that their exclusives would come out on other platforms. Back in the very early 2000s, fanboys would get irate at the smallest perceived slight to their preferred platform. But that hasn't been more than a very niche thing for a decade. Almost nobody cares now.
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We're losing the next generation to TikTok. The competition for gaming isn't Xbox and Nintendo. It's everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.
Round two: the television strikes back.
This is only a problem for capitalist shareholders (aka the ultra wealthy) who need to extract more wealth from consumers than they did last quarter but they're already at the limit of how much they can do so. Now the largest barrier is time and attention.
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We're losing the next generation to TikTok. The competition for gaming isn't Xbox and Nintendo. It's everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.
Round two: the television strikes back.
That quote is just horribly disturbing to me. He’s basically letting the mask drop that their endgame isn’t to make great games, it’s to make you hopelessly addicted to screen time that you obsessively play and spend
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One major argument for consoles is still that there is a single unified platform that gives better bang-for-buck than PC of the same price, and that studios can dev and optimize their games on more easily.
That's definitely true. But I would argue every additional "unit" of graphical improvement is becoming more and more expensive to the point where the relative benefits associated with a single unified platform are not as impactful as they once were.
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We're losing the next generation to TikTok. The competition for gaming isn't Xbox and Nintendo. It's everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.
Round two: the television strikes back.
Does this sound stupid to anyone else?
Like, the crowd you're "losing" to TikTok is unlikely to even go out and buy a console either way, am I wrong? -
That quote is just horribly disturbing to me. He’s basically letting the mask drop that their endgame isn’t to make great games, it’s to make you hopelessly addicted to screen time that you obsessively play and spend
Oh you should read the next part
The pandemic gave us an unnatural pop for gaming, where we thought, 'oh my god, gaming is the biggest thing in the world'. Yeah, when you're locked down, it is the biggest thing in the world. But in a regular world scenario, you've got to combat against all the other distractions that are available to young people. And I'm afraid that we're not facing that threat head on as an industry.
Motherfuckers see unnatural conditions caused by a once-in-a-lifetime event, think they're the hottest shit ever, and when the numbers come back to normal levels they see other forms of entertainment as a "threat" that should be "faced head on".
Lmao. How can an industry be so full of itself? -
Does this sound stupid to anyone else?
Like, the crowd you're "losing" to TikTok is unlikely to even go out and buy a console either way, am I wrong?But... but... the line has to go up! Don't you understand? It's not going up! Panic!
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I'm still waiting on the killer titles for the current generation of consoles. I'm frankly amazed that games have become so difficult to make, given how the graphical improvements aren't leaps. Build a stylish lighting system, make sure your textures and geometry aren't too ropey, and then make something creative.
I know it's not that simple, obviously, but I was playing through a fifteen year old FPS yesterday and the difference between now and then is just not that big. It's not nothing but the Gameboy philosophy of doing more with less would go a long way.
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