In a panel at Gamescom Asia, former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden explored the current state of the gaming industry, and in particular how the disappearance of 2A game studios has led to "creative exhaustion" in modern games. Layden points out that as the cost of making games rises, development teams are more inclined to recoup costs by updating games after release rather than taking risks and trying new ideas.
Layden said that in the past, developers didn't have to worry too much about the performance of the final product because the development cost was relatively low and the risk tolerance was relatively high. But now, the development cost of a game can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, which greatly reduces the willingness of developers to take risks.
In modern games, sequels often replicate their predecessors, as finance people set expectations based on existing success stories. He believes that this trend is leading to the exhaustion of creativity, and that the gaming industry's ability to innovate is being affected as studios continue to merge and development costs continue to rise.
While the quality of indie games is improving, Layden believes that the 2A gaming space between triple-A and indie games – a market once dominated by mid-sized companies such as Interplay, Gremlin, Ocean and THQ – seems to be gone. He warned that this is a bad sign for the gaming industry.
In addition, Layden stressed that it would be a good thing if there could be more attention and exposure to low-cost, high-creative games, and he hopes to see more of these works. If the game industry only relies on big games to promote, it will be like a death sentence. In 2020, he proposed that the triple-A game industry should return to the scale of a game that can be completed in 12 to 15 hours.