Spending $200 million on a video game and launching it exclusively for a single platform isn’t the greatest idea these days, according to Shawn Layden, former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, who mentioned in a new interview with GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi last week about how console exclusivity is an “Achilles’ heel” for companies, one that reduces the market and overall reach of a game. Layden’s statement comes just weeks after the release of HELLDIVERS 2, the new co-op third-person shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios that PlayStation, apparently wisely, decided to launch for both PS5 and PC on February 8, 2024.
Takahashi mentioned:
… Phil Spencer talked about the decisions they’ve made to take some games to Sony’s platform, to other platforms. One thing he said was that what everyone needs is for the market to grow. When the market’s not growing, it explains a lot of the suffering going on, and the need to rethink.
To which Layden agreed:
Absolutely. When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel. 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.
Layden goes on to point out the limitations of the console market:
… 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!