In 1990, I was made executive assistant to Akio Morita. So, at what 29 years old, I'm writing speeches for the founder of Sony that really taught me from his vantage about how he saw the company, how he saw products. Everything I know about business, I learned from Akio Morita.
>> Shawn Layden, a former PlayStation chairman and Sony executive who helped shape the modern games industry from the inside.
When we started PlayStation back in '94, we didn't have a game development arm, per se. As a platform, your job is to make the pie bigger. The content has to come from someplace else. And I remember going into Hollywood and trying to see, can we make a movie to get away? Pretty much got laughed out of every major studio in Hollywood. Why do you want to make Pong the movie? What are you talking about? And I realized, well, a whole generation has to move on before I can have this conversation again.
Let's start with the hey, who you are, what you do, and why.
Well, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are, folks on the world. Shawn Layden here. I spent 32 years working for Sony. 25 of those years were spent with the PlayStation group all the way back to PlayStation 1 up through the end of PS4. I spent the first part of my career with Sony in Tokyo. Then I spent about 10 years in London, then went back to Japan, then came to San Francisco about 15 years ago and have finished my PlayStation career in San Francisco. Now I live here. I'm working with some startups to try to get their projects off the ground. I do a little work with a nonprofit called Girls Make Games. In fact, it was just before this show was sitting in a long meeting talking about our scholarships for next school year. We're putting out four scholarships to young women who want to study computer science or game design in school. And that's my passion project around that nonprofit. And now I get the chance to come on air and talk to all of you about where I've been in the journey and maybe we'll talk about what I see for the future.
Also, I want to touch upon something that you referenced recently in an article about Xbox because I think that's probably a good place to start. In the previous episode I did with Richard, we talked a little bit about Xbox, but from your position and from your previous expertise, especially heading up PlayStation, what's your current view on firstly Xbox as a whole and then yeah, like we'll delve into a little bit more about the landscape a little bit after that, but yeah, Xbox in its entirety currently.
We'll get down to the basics of it. I think the thing I said recently has something to do with is there a strong understanding about what interactive entertainment is all about? Or even more to the point, what's entertainment all about? And I think Xbox has found itself, you know, they were great when it came out, you know, early in the PlayStation 2 era and through PlayStation 3 and the 360 and PS3. That was like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier going at it head-to-head for supremacy. And then the dynamic kind of changed over time with PS4 and into PS5. I think right now they find themselves in a situation where they've bought all the big studios or a lot of the big studios that are out there. They are in fact you could call them the largest game publisher in the west anyway and they have a platform. Now the problem is those two things pull against each other. You're going to be the platform for gamers or you're going to be the biggest publisher of games. You really can't do both at the same time.
I mean, for a long time, Nintendo and Sega managed to do that when they were fighting out in the game business back in the 80s and 90s. I think PlayStation really started a different approach towards that. When we started PlayStation back in '94, we didn't have a game development arm, per se. We brought a bunch of cousins in from Sony Music to teach us what entertainment is and how to make content that people want to buy. But throughout the course of the PlayStation career, Worldwide Studios, which is the first-party arm of PlayStation, never really had more than let's say 17 to 22% of the software market. The majority of the impetus on the platform was make this the people's platform. Make it the place where third parties can come and enjoy the opportunity, find an audience, bring their games out, and we will help that happen and make sure that that is robust and growing. The burden on first-party was not to be the biggest game publisher. Our message was, you know, we didn't want to go into and try to steal some of the pie from EA and steal some of the pie from Activision. As a platform, your job is to make the pie bigger. Your job is not to take the bigger slice. Your job is to make the pie bigger so everyone can come and enjoy the opportunity.
That's why first-party studios always have to do something different, something quirky, some risks that third parties would not take. You know, until you had, the whole category of rhythm action gaming didn't exist, but we made the investment. We brought that out. We tried so many different types of titles in PS1 and PS2 just to create new pockets of activity throughout the entertainment spectrum. And I think that's the role of a platform. So, if you want to be a major platform, exclusive content is important. Risky content is important. Making games that no one else would make like Vib-Ribbon is important. But if you want to be the biggest publisher in the world, that's a whole different dynamic. And I think multiplatform is a requirement. If you're going to try to be the biggest game publisher out there, you have to be on everything everywhere for everyone. So those two imperatives, I think, are in conflict right now. And I think that's where Xbox finds itself.
Yeah, we talked about Gears of War on the previous podcast with Richard and that was kind of like a strange move because at one stage it was going to kind of be multiplatform and then decided to go down the road with exclusives. Aside from like exclusives, I'm curious if you were to head up Xbox at this point of time, what different moves would you be making and why?
Well, being the head of Xbox, for that matter, being the head of PlayStation, the one thing we have to remember is that neither one of those entities are a fully independent owner-operated business. They are all pieces of a larger empire. Xbox being part of Microsoft and PlayStation being part of Sony. So the imperatives at a management level that you work against are not just in your business but how your business relates to the rest of the parent and the other companies inside that portfolio for the parent. So you ask me what I would advise Xbox. I don't have line of sight really on what their pressures are internally. I mean nor should I but I think the first instance is are you going to be a platform or are you going to try to be the biggest publisher in the world? That is like a decision tree, you know, they both go in different directions and then you build out from that.
So, I would love them to be a robust platform. I would love them to come back and have exclusive content only available on Xbox like Halo was that really made the platform a must-buy. If for no other reason, again, the analogy I used earlier, it's Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Well, for those of you who remember that, this is ancient history for a lot of people. But the idea is having two strong rivals in the marketplace creates all the pop. It creates the excitement. It creates the energy on both sides to best the other to come out with something bigger, something better. And in the end, the consumer wins. There's price competitiveness, there's content competitiveness, the consumer wins. And I think if one platform gets too strong, then some of that dynamic disperses and you're only looking at the market as where can I extract the most value, where can I get the most profitability out of instead of how do I stand up against this other platform which is challenging me every day with a different concept, a different game, a different way to market. That's why I would like them to go the platform route. But honestly, it may be too late.
What about the landscape as a whole? Because obviously you know we've been through so much period of flux recently as is evident from previous transformations within the industry again like to reference things from package goods to digital etc etc like we've been through these roads before but ultimately it seems to be hitting a little bit harder these days in respect to not only from a value perspective and the types of IP that people are privying and able to play. There's an awful lot of sequels, but then at the same fight there's an awful lot of layoffs and you know there's a good game doesn't always equate to a continuation of a studio like take Compulsion Games for example their studio and in regards to what's happening there. I'm curious to gauge your view as in you know what's led to this in this current point of transition and what's your views going forward?
It's about the profitability you can extract from the business. It's about what's your motivation in getting involved in this. For a while, it was kind of the home for, shall we say, rather nerdish people like myself where we're making games. We're making them because we think they're fun and our like-minded cohort thinks the same thing and we try to come up with something different and something that will pop. And whether it was Namco or whether it was THQ or Take-Two for that matter and EA and even those folks, it was all trying to fight on content, trying to come up with something that was, you know, more popular than the next person's thing and try to get to the top of the charts and get on the cover of a magazine.
Now, so much of game development is driven on what's the monetization scheme for your game project and how do we continue to pull value out of it over time and what's engagement mean and what's your DAU and your MAU. All of these acronyms and metrics which we didn't deal with back in as recently as 2005 are now becoming sort of primary. That is also a function of the fact that in PS1 you can make a game for $1 million. And now in the current era and that goes back it began at the end of PS3 and PS4 was pretty white hot and now PS5 generation is triple-digit millions everywhere you look. That has a depressive effect on risk tolerance. The more you spend to make a thing, the less risk you're willing to take in the making of it. That's why you get a lot of sequels, a lot of copycat games, because for the people who are signing off on the green light budget for that, they're always asking for comps, comparables. What's the comp for this? Because I need to do a spreadsheet which shows that if we make this game, it's going to be like that game, but maybe 5% more, 5% less, but I can build a trajectory against it. And it's a war shooter. It's kind of like Call of Duty, but we're going to call it something else. And you can kind of gauge what the addressable market is for that.
If you come out with I've got this rhythm action music dancing game in space with unicorns, there's just no comp to that. So it's very difficult for the finance guys to draw a chart which says yes let's put money into that thing. So those financial imperatives I think are making too much pressure upon the decisions you make creatively on the sort of games you're allowed to make and we end up being awash with a lot of reductive content, derivative content, sequels, whatnot.
The sequels aren't necessarily a bad thing because you know like in some cases again to reference like our conversation with Richard previously he talked about like the three-step process ultimately about building your beachhead and then going compounding the lessons that you learned from the first one into the second one and then you break out comes out in ultimately if you're given time and time to nurture and work within the same team that you your breakout hit often comes out in the third and you referenced like things like Witcher or I referenced also Baldur's Gate and others. So sequels aren't necessarily a bad thing, but then at the same point there is also clamoring towards new and original. And at the moment, you can look towards movies as we've referenced previously and some of the biggest movies out right now basically transitioning over from communities that have been driven through the likes of TikTok into YouTube and further down into Hollywood. Do you see a similar trend in respect to games going forward? And also like are we a bit too narrow in the niche of gaming and should we not be looking further afield towards like entertainment experiences as a whole?
Yeah, I think you know sequels equal bad. That's not what I was really saying but I'm saying that people will lean into a sequel posture just because you can. If the first one did this and the second one did that you can make an educated guess the third one will do this. I think we might both agree that trilogy seems to be the magic sum of sequels 1, 2, 3. When you get beyond three, the idea either gets tired or the team is different. It's even like watching movies or TV shows. Somehow you watch some TV shows, realize in season two, wow, they got the B team of writers for season 2 and oh my god, they got the C team of writers for season 3. So I think in gaming too, there's a time of the season for an idea and how much you can get out of it and how much story you want to tell around it.
But then some just go on forever, whether it's you look at Fast and Furious and ask yourself, do we really need 10 Fast and Furious movies? I don't know. Maybe you do. But that is a danger we have in the business. I think we're getting a bit ossified around some of these ideas of this is how the game works. This we have to put into it. This we're going to get out of it just like we did before. And you're right. I think we need to bust out. I don't know if even creating more variety in the marketplace is not anything new either because back in PS1 and PS2 goodness gracious it wasn't just Sony's. Everyone was just trying to create the craziest stuff possible just to see if there was an audience out there for it. But those were single-digit million-dollar bets, which you know, who doesn't do that? When it becomes 89 million or 114 million, again, people lose their nerve to innovate at those price points. And that's kind of the squeeze we find ourselves in right now.
Let's pivot back to your kind of initial beginnings went back out in the early days of you start out for PlayStation over in Japan and yeah kind of walk me through that like you reference often some of the people that you worked under being almost like an MBA. So let's walk through that journey because I think there's a lot of good ideas and good learnings to be gathered from that especially also the learnings that you got from working so closely at times with those within the music industry as well and how they looked at content and finding any new essentially new and original pieces. So yeah, I'd love to hear about that.
Well, I was lucky enough in 1987 to be an American college graduate hired out of the states to come to Tokyo to work at Sony headquarters in Shinagawa, Japan as part of their communications department. At the time, Sony was trying really hard to internationalize their business and they felt one of the ways to do that was to bring in more non-Japanese into the headquarter function to experience that and not just for ourselves, but of course for our colleagues we're working with to expose them to people from overseas. So I had that opportunity when I was very young in my 20s when you're a 26-year-old American working at Sony Corp. Not strangely, I guess. You get into more rooms than if you're a 26-year-old Japanese working at Sony Corp. So we'd have like Scott McNeely come over from Sun Microsystems to meet with Akio Morita, the founder of Sony. And someone would call my desk and go, 'Shawn, can you go up there?' Because we think Mr. McNeely would be happier if there's another American in the room. So, I got into a lot of rooms where I really didn't know what was going on, but I was there by virtue of the fact I came from the states and helped their people get on with that.
So, I worked with that. I worked with the team that did the Columbia Pictures buyout in 1989. We did the Sony Music buyout or CBS Records buyout in '88. And the company was gradually growing into the international entertainment and software business at that time. In 1990, I got pulled out of the communications department and was made executive assistant to Akio Morita, the founder of Sony. He needed a new speech writer and a new liaison with Europe and America. So, at what 29 years old, I'm writing speeches for the founder of Sony. Who knew that could happen? But it really taught me from his vantage about how he saw the company, how he saw his relationship with employees, how he saw products. He famously said, 'No market research in the world would have given you the Walkman.' Things like the Walkman just come out of sheer inspiration. You see two things, you put it together or you see nothing and you make something happen.
That's why I think Steve Jobs was so enamored with Sony and Akio Morita and how they went towards product design and how they went towards constantly innovating. You know, Morita would always say if you don't obsolete your own product, someone else will obsolete it for you. So you're murdering your darlings on a regular basis just to keep ahead of the market. He also talked about how you can't ask the customer what they want because they don't know what technology can give. So you have to come up with the idea yourself and then you have to educate the market to teach them this is why you need a Walkman. This is why compact disc can be important to you. This is why PlayStation got in the gaming business when already you had Nintendo and Sega as the two titans of the business and Sony Electronics had the temerity to get into the game business. Morita saw all that. Those things all got keyed off during his tenure. Sadly he had a stroke in 1993 and that made him step down from being a chairman of the company. PlayStation and Sony. Well, Sony was never stronger than when Morita was in charge and I had that great privilege for 5 years to be a member of his staff and I think what I said in other podcasts is that was my MBA. I didn't have to go to business school after that. Everything I know about business I learned from Akio Morita.
So, how did you take some of those lessons forward? Because I also heard in that particular podcast that we're referencing to the transition about going over to like Europe and the West and trying to find new products and IP and the lessons that you learned from that like what did you learn and also how did that impact how he went about creating and finding new IP and new markets?
Well, it was very important to Morita as he spread out his company across the world when he started Sony back in 1946, 80 years ago this year. He was entering into a market which already had electronics leaders. Toshiba, Matsushita, Hitachi, they were all big in Japan and he knew his opportunity was going to be overseas. For the longest time, 70% of Sony's business was done outside Japan. They had almost given up or not even tried to fight into the Japanese market and put all their emphasis overseas. And one of the things about his overseas drive that he knew very early on in his career was to be successful overseas, we need people of those regions of those countries running those businesses. We just can't put a bunch of Japanese executives across the globe and expect them to execute most effectively inside the market. So when he listed on the New York Stock Exchange back in the early 60s, he had Americans running Sony in America. He had Europeans running Sony in Europe. It was very important to him because he felt that's the only way you can get really down in the local living rooms to understand what people need and what they're looking for and how do we tell our story to people in France or people in South America or people in the US.
So I think what I learned when I went to London in 1998, we had just purchased Psygnosis and we were wrapping that into the Sony Computer Entertainment fold just to understand that we're not out there trying to tell people how to do their gaming job. In fact, maybe it was easier for us in PlayStation because we already knew we didn't know what we didn't know. That's why when we began the company back in 1993, Sony Computer Entertainment was started as a joint venture between Sony Electronics and Sony Music. Even at that time, Kutaragi and the other engineers understood that we can build the most amazing 32-bit 3D home PlayStation for games, but the content has to come from someplace else because we don't understand it. Which is why for a lot of people they're going to say, 'Yeah, that's right. You can't launch a PlayStation without Ridge Racer and Tekken.' And that's right because Namco was our strongest partner from even before the machine was launched. And to this day for Sony, they are very strong partners.
But we began to learn how to make games. And the Sony Music team that came in were the ones that led that charge. Most of the people in PD development, product development back in the day came from Sony Music. And buying a company like Psygnosis was a way to increase our ability to understand certainly in the west what western game design looked like, what development would be like. We had great success with games like Destruction Derby or Wipeout which was a seminal game certainly in Europe and Formula 1 which was the first game I worked on from Psygnosis which was a revelation. Again the Morita lesson is work at a local level with people there. No one knows the local market better than the people who are there and if you're going to come in there and try to tell them about their own market you're a fool. There's nothing you can possibly know that they don't know better than you. And we tried to be a listening post. We tried to bring as many people into the room to have that conversation. Those are crazy times. The early 2000s in London boy. Cool Britannia, right? That's what it was at the time.
I've heard also when you talked about this particular part of your career about the whole three concentric circles approach to IP, I'd love to delve a little bit more as well.
Well, you know, we started in gaming back in the day. You think about on PlayStation 1 that era like the three biggest gaming genre were fighting games, racing games, platform games. Three genre which we don't hear much about anymore at all. They're pretty much locked in. You know, if it's a racing game, it's Forza, Gran Turismo, or Formula 1. If it's a fighting game, it's Tekken, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat. And if it's a platform game, we haven't seen the platform game for a long time until Astro Bot, you know, came back as a kind of a retro thing. And that was those were gaming things because it came out of the arcade. The whole conceit around PlayStation 1 is we're taking the game center and bringing it into your house. So those are the first games that we built the business around.
Over time with more abilities, whether it's the emotion engine of PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 3 and the Cell processor and the extra power they gave us to go to HD gaming, Blu-ray as a storage medium, which made everything possible that you're able to tell stories that were a bit more involved. I know you're a fan of Last of Us, Peter, and that's we needed that kind of technology to tell that story. We couldn't tell that story on PlayStation 1.
The technology wasn't there. Square is probably the best who did it in the early PlayStation era. You know, FF7, a lot of people cried when the heroine dies. So, but most people couldn't pull off that trick. And until we had a more immersive ability to present our games through technology, which allow to happen, would make those things happen, games could be bigger, games could be larger. I think that was an important change for us to tell that and so all of a sudden we came from this world where we have gaming IP movies and TV and music and there was a crossover you know the Venn diagram was kind of you know we had game then we had Wipeout which was kind of music we're bringing Chemical Brothers and The Crystal Method and Prodigy into the gaming world to make that relevant to more people and movies came in I mean in the early 2000s every movie studio had MGM Interactive, Fox Interactive, Universal Interactive. They felt they had a bunch of IP. They could bring out games based on that. Didn't quite work so well for most of them, but they were adjacent. Now today, we're seeing those three circles are pretty much three concentric circles. And the one thing that ties them all together is the concept of intellectual property. So if you have a great idea, a great character, a great story, a great world. How can that be relevant in two or three of those categories? Through the music of that experience. The characters, you have an interactive experience, but can you tell a story? You have the game Last of Us which is amazing. Now you have the HBO series which is Emmy award-winning based on Last of Us. So those are things where the game set of intellectual property and the film and television set are the same set. It's just how you express that is different.
And I think you referenced something in there about how at the beginning we take from the arcades but I think now my personal opinion is that just because you mentioned music like if you look at things like Journey for example and the music around that when you actually understand how to tell a story to the depth that can pull people emotionally and you draw in from lots of different elements of that with the music be it visuals be it the depth of the character interplay that you create or even the depth of the world that people play within. I think we can actually tell a lot more deeper and more immersive stories to be told. And I do also get that there is a lot of different markets to sell to and to offer a game to. That may be people like me that just love story-based games or it may be people looking for community-based experiences. Now that's absolutely fine. But I do think that when you are able to layer in more depth through how we connect to music to how we connect to character and that in itself gives more emotive experiences and I do feel that currently we are kind of lacking a little bit of that. It's almost as if we've shied away from that.
Exactly. And that's one of the other threats that are coming at our business. One we talked about the financial burdens of cost structures and how to make money and what's your ROI and all that kind of stuff. But there's also this tendency now where when risk tolerance goes to zero due to the high cost of game production, you end up making the stuff you know or making the stuff that sold last time or just make another version for it this time. And so the problem with that, it may speak to the base, it may speak to the core who would just love to have more space marine military shooters if we can give them everything we want. But that's not going to grow our market. That's going to give the people who are already there more of the things they want to have.
If we're going to take gaming and make it as ubiquitous as, you know, compact disc players once were or Blu-ray players or toasters, we have to find a way to break out content-wise. If you look at every generation of hardware content, the PS1 generation with Sega Saturn and looked that across all the other different generations, you never get a global aggregate number of consoles more than 250 million. Well, usually over 200, maybe 180, 200. I think it got to 250 that one year when Wii U came out and everyone thought you could lose weight by getting on Wii Fit. So, a lot of non-console players bought it because you buy that with a rowing machine and stuff like that and that spiked. That was a new audience, people who didn't have games. I think Wii did a lot of that too.
But now in the current setup, we are all excited about GTA 6 and so we should be. That's going to be a seismic event. It's going to shake the timbers. Everyone's going to go crazy. We have this expression in game publishing. There's a blast radius. When this game drops, don't be two weeks before that or two weeks after that. For GTA, it's like, don't be a month before that, or a month after that. It's going to suck all the oxygen out of this space. But if you take two steps back and think about it, most of the people in the world have said they're not interested in Grand Theft Auto. Most of the people in the world said they're not interested in Call of Duty or FIFA or any of the games we're doing now because look at the numbers, right? They max out. I mean GTA is an outlier but even at that it's still not like a Michael Jackson album or back in the day or music that kind of thing.
So as an industry how are we going to, to your point, reach out to folks who you know I'm not into shooting I'm not into racing. I'm into fighting. Can we have a different experience through gaming? Can we attract people who normally wouldn't jump into a deathmatch war zone experience but might want to do something else or experience something else? You know, we are financially the biggest entertainment medium in the history of mankind. But if you go into a bar or restaurant and there's 20 people in there and you ask them all what their favorite song is, everybody has an answer. Or their favorite movie, everyone has an answer. You ask them their favorite game, I still say there's more than a handful of holdouts who say, 'I don't play games.' So, our social impact is inverse to our financial impact.
It's interesting though because, you know, looking at GTA, obviously the pre-sales have been insane, but they have to be insane because the amount of money putting into the game to begin with. But, you know, we talk about things like platforms or are you going to be a publisher? But to me, at least the way that I'm kind of looking it, I think it's all about property and the ones that actually understand that we're not just games within a niche anymore. But if we do want to have that breakout, we cannot just be confined to the niche of gaming, we have to kind of broaden our horizons and start looking at entertainment experiences as a wider property. You know, I think when you're able to then come up with properties that can engage people and do look to create stories that are going to drive people in emotionally to become memorable in the same way that when we first experienced great film back in the day, that is what I think is the next layer for the sector as a whole is the fact that we broaden our wings per se. But again, it has to be down to the types of stories that we want to tell and also understand the market that we're going to trying to kind of sell through because you're not going to get that type of experience within a Roblox, but you can go down the route of Roblox and get an amazing level of engagement. But again, it's like it's fighting your battles. But I do think that the whole premise of property is the missing piece. Like because if you look at, you know, the next iteration, let's say there's going to be like another version of PlayStation or there's a next Xbox coming out or there's a new Steam console coming out, like we're looking at, you know, 1,600 bucks. Who has that money to drop on a console, bearing in mind what you just said about like how, you know, we are a big industry, but ultimately if you talk to somebody in a bar like what's your favorite movie or what's your favorite album? they can easily roll out of a tone, but what's your favorite game? Some may not be in there because it's still confined to a niche in my perspective. I'd love to get your take on that long waffle.
Well, I think we're in violent agreement on most of the point you're making, which is why this moment in time for a lot of people it's like, oh my god, this is doom and gloom. Some people have said, I don't want to I'll leave the name out because I don't have chapter and verse, but someone said they lived through the Atari gloom and doom and they said the current state is even gloomier or doomier than 1984. There are ways you can look through the prism and get to that outcome. But I think the current moment is important. It's like every 60 years the forest has to burn down for it to grow back. And I think we're kind of in that situation right here, right now that things that we believed, you know, the ancient shibboleths of gaming, some of them are proving not to be operational anymore. And but the fundamental is the same. The fundamental is that people want to be entertained and people want to have an experience where it affects them emotionally.
I think a lot of live service gaming doesn't have a real emotional component to it. You know, it's kind of did I win, did I lose? You know, what's happening? Okay, start again. Round two. Oh, round three. I'm old school and I've been criticized many times online for this by saying that for me a game has to have character, story, and world. And it's the interplay of those three components that actually make a game that I would want to play. And I think a lot of people are coming back to first principles around that. I think we've seen some success over the last couple of years with single-player narrative games coming back again and getting an audience and getting a resurgent of interest in that.
Sometimes you can look at that same prism and what I see in the gaming sector now is it's kind of like movies between the late 60s and the early 70s right where the 60s thing of whether it's in the cast of thousands and we're going to recreate Exodus or the Ten Commandments or we're going to make a bunch of westerns or we're going to have these nice family-friendly rom-coms that kind of stuff which the hell storm of activity and angst and madness which occurred in late 60s and into the 70s I think also gave us Scorsese and Coppola and Kubrick. Well, Kubrick was back in the 50s, but you know, really became big with 2001. I think we're at that point now where a new generation of creators are going to break through and realize that many of the tools we've made for a medium we may have over-peaked. I mean, really, how much more ray tracing can we take? And if we're at 60 frames per second, I don't know if 120 frames per second makes the experience twice as good. Instead of leaning into those kind of specs, how do we come up with a more streamlined piece of hardware that has all the power of the stuff we see today, but brings it out, number one, in a more affordable configuration, and number two, one that can spread further, whether through handheld or whether through other kinds of portable devices, something that gets us through that 200 to 250 million cap, which seems to occur with anything console. I'm hoping that I'm sadly I think it's going to get a little bit tougher before it gets better, but through that great compression of energy, a new diamond will pop out and I'm here for it.
Yeah, I think we are in that period of reflection now if people are being brutally honest with themselves because like if you look at like the bubble per se of COVID when so many people at home and you also had the opportunity this is why we went down the route of like live services because it's so easy to monetize at that particular point in time and you know companies grew exponentially they all believed that if especially from a modeling perspective if this sold this amount during that time then we should be able to like mimic that and it was just the same old like failures of finance in regards to how they project and that's fine but I think that you know a bit like free-to-play and such I do think that these kind of models have had their time and I'm not going to say there'll be a death of live services because there's still communities to be served but I do think that we are at that period of reflection about well what are the kind of stories we want to tell how do we want to push the industry forward and how do we go about doing that. It's great that you reference movies because I do think that you know a bit like your arcade reference at the beginning about the early guises of PlayStation. I do think that now like we are going to take a lot more inspiration about you know what impacted us like I'm 42 now so what impacted me growing up what impacted my generation growing up because we're starting to take those roles of leadership within industry and in that fact then we're going to go back to things like you know Stand By Me like the trilogy of Back to the Future you're going to look at like E.T. what specifically about these pieces of content like Ghostbusters as well what worked around that that could work going
forward into film and into entertainment experiences as a whole. And you know, also when you look at people like Christopher Nolan and what he's done within the movie industry, like I do think that there are some kind of Christopher Nolanesque talents within games. And I'll look at like people like Neil Druckmann, I'll look at Joseph Fares, but we still need to figure out, okay, these are the stories we've told thus far. But because we have so much advantage on our side now in regards to there's no excuse for in regards to the products that we can play our games within. And they're so powerful now that you can do whatever on them that we almost owe it to ourselves as well as the industry as well as the player base to deliver upon those narratives that people are going to look back and go, rather than where we do it now where it's like, you know, The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption or, you know, reference titles that have been around for some time. I'm waiting for the next iteration of titles to come through and I do believe that we're at that point of transition that yeah, it's just a matter of time for them to come because people want more content but either a mirror to themselves and their own experiences or deeper narratives and experiences that can, you know, take people on a, it doesn't necessarily have to be a 60, 70 minute journey but it's like look at the last Bond game that came out or look at, you know, reference mixtape in previous podcasts, like they don't have to be these like massive behemoths. But if we do pivot to, you know, more well, why are we trying to tell this story or what do we want people to feel? Then I think we'll actually get to a better position.
Yes. Yes. And yes, I agree with all of that. I think certainly on the length of gaming back when the average age of the gamer was, let's say, 18 to 24 or 16 to 26 or in that space, most people are time rich and money poor. So you'd get your money together. Incidentally enough, it was about 60 bucks a game back in the 90s as well. That's the one thing about the price of games. It's been no elasticity on that number. But you had more time. So you wanted 120 hours of gameplay or 140 hours of gameplay or whatever it was. And that became a badge. That became things that even journalists were like, 'Well, this game is great, but it's only 40 hours of gameplay.' And so people started like padding out your game. We also had this strange dynamic and this is, you know, we're kind of guilty of it ourselves. We were always worried, this was when they had rental games back in the US, it was like Blockbuster, in Japan it was, and I forget in Europe where you do it, but we wanted to make sure we had enough gameplay under there that you couldn't finish it in a weekend, right? You couldn't do a 40-hour rental and finish a game. We wanted you to either rent it again or, you know, come back or just buy it. Just don't bother renting it. Just buy it. So that was probably a bad impulse on the game development side of things.
But I think that you mentioned your age. You said you're 42. So now you're in a place where some of these decision making is happening. I saw the phenomenon in real time back in the early 2000s when I went to Hollywood. We just shipped this game called The Getaway.
