Former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden says the AAA model is no longer sustainable and has urged developers to scale back.

AAA games are titles developed by major developers via a large budget, with the most recent coming out in the form of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II. The first installment of the game took Naughty Dog three-and-a-half years to make, while the sequel took six. And Layden, who was in charge of PlayStation Worldwide Studios for the latter part of his 25-year stay with the company, reckons making such games is becoming way too expensive.

Layden left Sony last October and is proud of the game mostly being developed under his watch as it offers an incredible experience that brings out all sorts of emotions.

“We can make you scream and yell and be horrified - those are the easy ones to get,” he told Gamesbeat’s Dean Takahashi as part of Gamelab Live this week (H/T gamesindustry.biz. “But if we can make you contemplative, sad, that’s really hitting the full gamut of emotional response to the gaming experience.”

Sony is very unlikely to publish TLOU and TLOU 2’s budgets but we can well imagine how much was put into games of their length and quality. Layden doesn’t see the model as being something that can be kept up, though, and thinks studios should better evaluate plans with regards to product making in future.

“The problem with that model is it’s just not sustainable,” he continued. “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,” he continued. “I think the industry as a whole needs to sit back and go, ‘Alright, what are we building? What’s the audience expectation? What is the best way to get our story across, and say what we need to say?’

“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 reevaluate that.”

Even more importantly, according to Layden, AAA isn’t sustainable because, while budgets keep going up, retail prices for games have been the same for as long as he can remember and he can’t imagine gamers accepting the idea of a stretch in cost.

He said: “Instead of spending five years making an 80 hour game, what does three years and a 15 hour game look like?”

“It’s been $59.99 since I started in this business, but the cost of games have gone up ten times. If you don’t have elasticity on the price-point, but you have huge volatility on the cost line, the model becomes more difficult. I think this generation is going to see those two imperatives collide.”

Source: gamesindustry.biz