Shawn Layden has resigned from Sony Interactive Entertainment following the launch of PS5. He's been with the company since the launch of the first PlayStation in the 1990s, so he's overseen several eras in the gaming industry.
But a lot has already changed in the short time since he left Sony in 2021. Console prices are rising, risk aversion is at an all-time high, and most recently PlayStation reversed its strategy of slowly porting games to PC. Layden pioneered this strategy during his time at Sony, and is now commenting on the company's decision to scrap it.
The former Sony boss said that anyone who waited 18 months for a PC port won't buy a PS5 anyway.
As discovered by Respawn First, Layden made these comments in an interview with PSI.
“There was a lot of misunderstanding about my decision.” [PlayStation] Layden says: “For me at the time, honestly, the PC thing wasn't about making money. How do I get my intellectual property in front of people who wouldn't normally see it? How do I make the world of Horizon visible to people who aren't in the PlayStation world?
He further said that it is not intended to drive hardware sales. “Not necessarily because they're going to buy a PlayStation. I wasn't that crazy. I didn't think that would happen,” he says. “But if we’re going to take our intellectual property through other media – film, TV, comic books, merchandise – we need as many eyeballs as there are to recognize these characters and this story.”
We're Still Buying Consoles Mainly for Exclusives, Industry Analyst Reports
Despite the industry rhetoric, exclusivity is still the biggest reason to buy a console.
Now that PlayStation is looking to abandon this strategy, Layden has hit back at the idea that it hurt console sales in the first place. “If you think a game is coming out 18 months after launch. [on PC] They stopped selling in the hardware business 18 months ago, and I'd like to see how they can prove that claim,” he explains. “If someone waits 18 months for something to come out on PC, I don't think we've lost a sale to them. “They weren’t going to buy the hardware anyway.”
And despite this twist, Layden is confident that some of Sony's games will continue to be ported. “If you have a massively multiplayer online game or a live service game (obviously a free-to-play game), it has to be multi-platform because it just doesn’t make economic sense,” he says.
We already know that despite several major failures, Sony isn't giving up on its live service anytime soon. So you only have to look at Marathon to see how difficult it is to launch a new live service, so we can expect it to launch on at least PC and even Xbox.
