Exclusivity Is the Achilles' Heel of Huge Blockbusters, Says Former PlayStation Exec 1

There’s a huge amount of chatter about exclusivity in the aftermath of Microsoft’s decision to port select titles to PlayStation and choppy waters in the industry at large. This year alone has seen thousands of game developers laid off, as the industry attempts to course correct following over investment during the coronavirus pandemic.

But as budgets for tentpole titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 soar, many are beginning to question whether the traditional exclusivity paradigm is even feasible anymore. It’s a topic PlayStation’s well-liked ex-executive Shawn Layden has touched upon in a huge interview with Games Beat – and he believes sticking to a single format may be the Achilles’ heel of the industry’s most expensive releases.

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“When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel,” he explained. “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 per cent 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.”

Layden pointed to the recent success of Helldivers 2, which is a PlayStation published game that released day-and-date on both PS5 and PC – a relatively new approach from Sony which has proven wildly successful.

Of course, Helldivers 2 is a live service game, so what does that mean for the platform holder’s bread-and-butter single player titles? “If you’re spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell [your game] to as many people as possible, even if it’s just 10 per cent more,” he pointed out. “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.”

Layden believes the industry needs to expand beyond its current market. “We’re not doing enough to get heretofore non-console people into console gaming,” he noted. “We’re not going to attract them by doing more of the sh*t we’re doing now. If 95 per cent 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.”

PlayStation, in general, is registering record revenues at the moment – but its costs are through the roof. It’s rumoured titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, as alluded to by Layden here, cost over $200 million to make, meaning there’s little margin for error. Exactly how it’s going to wrestle with these ever-increasing budgets when enthusiasts continue to demand bigger and better games remains to be seen.

[source venturebeat.com]