Former PlayStation exec calls exclusivity the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of blockbuster games

Former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden has suggested the platform holder will need to consider releasing more games on PC in future, in order to cover the huge budgets for its first-party blockbusters.

The future of console platform exclusives has become a hot topic in the games industry recently, after Microsoft announced plans to bring four games to PlayStation 5, and Sony became the latest company to announce a wave of job cuts following lower-than-expected financial results.

Both Xbox and PlayStation’s biggest hits of 2024 so far – Palworld and Helldivers 2 – have also been fuelled mostly by PC game sales.

Shawn Layden, who during a 30-year career at Sony served as CEO of SIE America and chairman of Worldwide Studios, commented on the future of console exclusives in a new interview with GamesBeat.

“When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel,” he said. “It reduces your addressable market. Particularly when you’re in the world of live service gaming or free-to-play. Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in.

“In a free-to-play world, as we know, 95% percent of those people will never spend a nickel. The business is all about conversion. You have to improve your odds by cracking the funnel open. Helldivers 2 has shown that for PlayStation, coming out on PC at the same time. Again, you get that funnel wider. You get more people in.”

Single-player games aren’t facing the same pressure to release on multiple platforms, Layden said, “but if you’re spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell it to as many people as possible, even if it’s just 10% more.

“The global installed base for consoles–if you go back to the PS1 and everything else stacked up there, wherever in time you look at it, the cumulative consoles out there never gets over 250 million. It just doesn’t.

“The dollars have gone up over time. But I look at that and see that we’re just taking more money from the same people. That happened during the pandemic, which made a lot of companies overinvest. Look at our numbers going up! We have to chase that rocket!”

Layden, who is now advising companies such as Tencent and Readygg, said he believes the industry isn’t doing enough to get “non-console people” into console gaming.

“We’re not going to attract them by doing more of the shit we’re doing now. If 95% of the world doesn’t want to play Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Grand Theft Auto, is the industry just going to make more Call of Duty, Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto? That’s not going to get you anybody else.”