Ex-PlayStation boss Shawn Layden often pops up with some interesting insight and opinions these days, now that he’s long removed from Sony’s gaming business.
This is a guy who knows more about the industry than most of us ever will, and so his takes are always worth listening to — especially when they’re on hot topics like Sony’s recent decision to step away from porting its single player titles to PC.
In an interview with PSI, Layden admits that he doesn’t quite understand PlayStation’s adjusted approach.
He argues that, at least during his time at the company, porting previously exclusive games to PC was never really about profit — it was about expanding the reach of key properties.
Layden begins: “The PC thing… In my mind anyway, at the time, was not to make money, frankly. It was ‘how do I get my intellectual property in front of people who wouldn’t normally see it?’.”
“Not necessarily because they’re gonna buy a PlayStation — I wasn’t that crazy, I didn’t think that was gonna happen — but as we take our intellectual property across other media, whether it’s into films and television, or comic books, or into merchandise, whatever, you need to have as many eyeballs that are aware of this character, of this story.”
He continues: “And just concentrating on the PlayStation population, and only telling them these stories, and then trying to bring it off of that platform and into different media — that’s gonna be a hell of a jump.”
The idea of porting known properties to other platforms “was really just to get mindshare”, Layden summarises.
Of course, this perspective contrasts reports that financial profit was an all-important reason for Sony’s shift away from PC.
At the start of June, Bloomberg’s ever-reliable Jason Schreier laid it out, saying: “[the single-player PC ports] didn’t make enough money, and they want to keep their IP aligned to their own platform.”
But again, as stressed by Layden, making money was never the main goal.
He does add context, however, pointing towards the relative success that Sony has found in porting its multiplayer titles to other platforms.
“If you have a massively multiplayer online game or a live service game — certainly a free-to-play game — then you have to be multiplatform. Because the economics don’t work.”
He breaks it down: “It’s all about, as we say in the business, the size of the funnel. Because you put all of these people through the funnel in a free-to-play game, and if you get… 3% of those people that actually spend money on a thing, that’s your conversation rate, then you go ‘yay, we made money’.”
“But it has to be 3% of 50 million. Not 3% of 5 million. So that’s what happens with those kinds of games, that’s why they go multiplatform.”
