Former Sony boss says the trade’s obsession with the ‘mirage’ of stay service video games is futile: ‘The freeway is affected by individuals desirous to tackle Fortnite’

One factor I’m a minimum of moderately assured that we on the good ship PC Gamer share with you lot is the actual fact we’re all a bit sick of stay service video games. As fellow PCG author Ted Litchfield put it within the article I simply linked, “Surely we’ve seen enough to know that trying to retrofit a singleplayer studio into a ‘live service machine go brrr’ moneymaker is not a smart bet.”

Joining the gang of nodding heads on this explicit matter is Shawn Layden, a former Sony exec who left the corporate in 2019, who was a part of a multi-developer interview with The Ringer’s Lewis Gordon.

“It’s like a mirage on the top of a sand dune,” Layden says. “You pursue it. You can’t quite get there. Or if you do get there, what you brought to the party no one wants to play anyway.”

As the article notes, Layden’s tenure oversaw a trio of Sony’s singleplayer knockouts, and a part of why he left the corporate was resulting from their live-service pivot, which he quips have been “not my skillset.”

Layden oversaw God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Ghost of Tsushima. Not a horrible monitor report in case you’re arguing that singleplayer video games are extra dependable than hounding after that stay service pot of gold, I’d say. As a matter of reality, Layden says that whereas he, too, noticed the mirage, he knew it wasn’t an excellent wager:

“My view at the time was, ‘We’re super strong on single-player. We have the best narrative in the business.’ It was a case of, ‘I’m doing The Last of Us—that’s where we swim. I’m gonna do Spider-Man’ … Fortnite is the classic example of catching lightning in a jar, you can’t plan for that. You can’t prepare for that. You can’t envision that.”

He additionally simply wasn’t that within the concept of constructing one: “A live-service game to me isn’t really a game. It’s a repetitive action engagement device.”

Ultimately, Layden argues that “The highway is littered with people wanting to take on Fortnite, with people trying to do Overwatch with different skins … If you’re trying to go into that space because you have this illusion in your mind of big sacks of money coming every day for the rest of your life, for most it doesn’t happen.”

I can solely think about how Layden should’ve felt late final yr when his intestine intuition was confirmed precisely proper, and Concord, Sony’s try at an Overwatch, existed for lower than a month before Sony decided to pull the plug. And, uh, also Marathon. And then the other live service games it axed in a panicked flurry.

That’s not to say all of their attempts have failed; Helldivers 2 did pretty well, and Sony published that one. But, er, Layden was the one to greenlight that, so it might just be that Sony lost its nose when he departed.