Video games have become too long and too expensive to make claims an ex-PlayStation boss, as he calls for a return to 12-hour running times.
It’s a problem that’s been brewing for decades now but which the coronavirus pandemic has made especially obvious: video games are taking so long to make that increasingly few are being released every year.
Whereas in the PlayStation 2 era most developers would release half a dozen or more games it’s now got to the point where in this generation most have only managed one or two at most.
As the amount of time and money needed to make a triple-A game increases the number of new titles being released has decreased, and that trend seems ready to continue in the next generation. But at least one industry figure feels that the constant expansion cannot continue.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, former PlayStation exec Shawn Layden used The Last Of Us and its sequel as an example, with the first game lasting for 15 hours and taking three-and-a-half years to make. By comparison, the sequel took six year to make and lasts 25 to 30 hours.
‘The problem with that model is it’s just not sustainable,’ said Layden. ‘I don’t think that, in the next generation, you can take those numbers and multiply them by two and think that you can grow’.
The most important figure, though, is the one that is never made public: how much a game costs to make. But according to Layden the rule of thumb that the price to make high-end games doubles every generation is broadly true.
The current average is between $80 and $120 million (not including marketing costs) with a five-year development period.
‘It’s hard for every adventure game to shoot for the 50 to 60-hour gameplay milestone, because that’s gonna be so much more expensive to achieve. And in the end you may close some interesting creators and their stories out of the market if that’s the kind of threshold they have to meet… We have to re-evaluate that.’
The other problem is one gamers are loathe to admit: the cost of making games has increased tenfold in the last 25 years but the cost of buying them has remained largely the same.
Layden’s answer is a to make shorter games but more quickly, with a return to the 12 to 15-hour average of a generation or two ago.
‘Personally, as an older gamer… I would welcome a return to the 12 to 15 hour [AAA] game’, he said.
‘I would finish more games, first of all, and just like a well edited piece of literature or a movie, looking at the discipline around that could give us tighter, more compelling content.’
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