Ex-PlayStation Boss Shawn Layden Thinks New Ideas And Patience Will Help Industry Layoffs

PlayStation‘s former boss Shawn Layden lays down the hammer on the games industry’s global layoff epidemic and believes if patience was applied by companies, layoffs wouldn’t be as widespread as they currently are. The industry veteran shared his opinions on the podcast for GI Sprint, a new editorial special from GamesIndustry.biz that includes video panels, podcasts, interviews and more to help developers make games cheaper, faster, and better.

Just six months into the year and 2024 has seen more layoffs than 2024, making it a grim and often hopeless milestone. In the podcast, which airs later today, Layden, who has over two decades of industry knowledge, has some choice words of advice and wisdom for the companies who are making these devastating decisions.

New Ideas And Patience

In an article reported by GIBiz, Layden criticized the current state of the games industry by suggesting there just wasn’t enough innovation in companies when it comes to seeing the bigger picture and believes that having endurance and playing the long game, would eventually help matters, especially when it comes to smaller studios. “That’s the real frustrating thing when you see people say ‘look here’s a small studio that made a great game, it has true promise, it created an entirely new gaming experience, but we don’t have the patience to play this thing out into part two or part three’,” said Layden.

He further explains that profits, naturally, play a big role in these companies, so as soon as something looks like it will fail, they end up tossing it to the side and moving onto something that seems to be a safer bet, like bigger IPs, so the payout has more of a chance of being greater. “Even though they didn’t really get wiped out by it, they didn’t have the windfall profits they expected and so they just kill this thing and go for more established AAA IP, sequels, copycats, and things that from a financial perspective you can draw a through line and say if we build this game it likely performs like this in the market.”

Layden also states that “the publishing industry doesn’t have patience now to nurture these things” because there is so much pressure from within to chase the bigger, easier wins and that this current strategy is “a terrible place to be in an entertainment and creative industry.” He also hits out at games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty and says players have previously stated that these titles have become monotonous over the years so “building more of those experiences will not get them in. It seems pretty axiomatic to me.”

Discussing the pandemic when companies started gobbling up gaming studios, Layden stated that even though it was understandable when the going was good, it was shortsighted to believe that making “huge investments” and then thinking that would continue at a “never-ending 20% growth rate year on year” was “a huge gamble”. “That’s why patience is the thing that’s important. The industry is losing patience. It’s ‘we need to find a way to solve this problem in six months’ in an industry where nothing gets done in six months.”

It certainly doesn’t look like the layoffs will end anytime soon. Only yesterday, the Embracer Group closed the Alone in the Dark studio, Pieces Interactive, due to the reboot apparently underperforming. At this rate and if things don’t change quickly, we will see layoff figures double for 2025, just as they did this year from 2023, and so the cycle will continue – the snake eating its own tail.

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