saintjules
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Shawn Layden: Consolidation is the enemy of diversity
At Gamelab last year, Shawn Layden grabbed headlines for calling out the spiralling costs of game development.Although …
www.gamesindustry.biz
"People don't buy consoles because they want more steel and plastic in the living room. People buy consoles because they want access to the content. If you can find a way to get the content into people's homes without a box, then yes, indeed. Everyone has a streaming solution of some form. Most of it is limited by whether you have a decent internet connection. And they haven't constructed the business model that works yet for that.
"With each console generation, the cost of games goes up 2x. So PS4 games were $100 to $150m, so it stands to reason that PS5 games -- when they hit their stride -- will be in excess of $200m. It's going to be very difficult for more than a handful of large players to compete in that space.
"It's very hard to launch a $120m game on a subscription service charging $9.99 a month. You pencil it out, you're going to have to have 500 million subscribers before you start to recoup your investment. That's why right now you need to take a loss-leading position to try to grow that base. But still, if you have only 250 million consoles out there, you're not going to get to half a billion subscribers. So how do you circle that square? Nobody has figured that out yet."
"The independent developer is the constant chase for funding. That's so all-consuming. It's become even harder now. On the one hand, the overall budgets for games are no longer in the $15,000 range. They require some serious capital. And the indies are going out there looking for that funding, and the ones who have real promise are just being bought out and sucked into a larger vortex filled with studios sitting under a larger hat.
"Or they're being told things like: 'why don't you start a GoFundMe, and you can get a certain amount of money, and then come back and we'll look again'. The leverage is so disproportionately in the publishing side of the business, that the creative side doesn't have the chance to move its vision forward without coming into some form of financial agreement, or trying to do something underfunded and working like crazy to then be told 'we're not interested'. And then the whole thing just crashes and burns.
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