You've likely heard it once after French phenomenon Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took over the world with baguettes and berets, or you could have heard it twice, but former Sony CEO Shawn Layden is here to tell you again: AA games are the promised land.
"I think we've plateaued on the tech, frankly," Layden says in a new GamesIndustry.biz interview. "How many of us can really tell the difference between 90 frames per second and 120 frames per second?" He wants developers to "stop chasing photorealism" and start pursuing "AA gaming, with a wide variety of content and games."
"I think that's where the growth is going to be," he predicts. "We're going to see a rebirth."
This seems to be becoming an increasingly popular sentiment among studio bosses after the success of Expedition 33 and its notoriously "small" development team. The game's own director Guillaume Broche even recently said, "As development costs continue to grow, I think we're likely to see an increase in companies like ours, producing AA-class games."
"Thanks to Unreal Engine," he explained, "it's now easier to get an idea of the amount of resources you'll need relative to your production scale."
Layden suggests he's wholly on board with this idea. He says to GamesIndustry.biz that "gigantic companies like EA, Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft, they have all expanded to an unsustainable size, largely during COVID when gaming revenues went up 22% year-on-year, and people thought this rocket was going to the moon."
What's actually happened is "a lot of layoffs in the industry, which is sad," Layden continues, "but maybe it's a readjustment, a realignment of the business."
Former PlayStation boss is convinced more console generations will come, but doesn't know if Microsoft will be part of them: "Watching what Xbox has been doing recently, I do get Dreamcast flashbacks."
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